Background
Replit is cloud-native and multiplayer by default, so collaboration is in its DNA. However, I often found myself frustrated when working live with others, as we were breaking each other's environments while typing. This experience collision is unacceptable for professional software teams and is what inspired my idea for Replit Projects.
Architecture
A Replit Project is a collaboration primitive that allows teammates to work on an app together without interfering with each other's environments. Structurally, it is a collection of Repls that have shared version history. Collaborators can fork a source Repl, work in their own environment, then merge changes back when ready. Built on Git, it is essentially a centralized, cloud-native version of trunk-based version control.
A key benefit of the project primitive is that all ongoing work is viewable in one place. You can see the current state of main and all downstream development forks. These Repls remain cloud multiplayer environments, so you can see who is coding live in them, giving each Repl a sense of place. You can view your entire team's location live on the environment tree.
Workflow
To create a project, you fork a normal Repl and are prompted to start a project. This converts your original Repl into the main Repl and creates a new development fork. After making changes, you or a reviewer can use the project tool to review diffs and merge them back into the parent Repl when ready. While this is typically the main Repl, arbitrary forking and merging is supported.
One goal was to abstract away Git's complexity for less experienced programmers. We added shortcuts, such as removing the concept of commits. The absence of commits in a development fork signals that a user might prefer to directly merge changes.
Future
We shipped Projects as a feature for our Teams platform and are working to bring it to individual customers. We are also enhancing it with production deployment automations, deeper integration with global project history, better code review tools, and more shortcuts with code generation and AI-assisted experiences.