The irony that I find myself posting this in tips and tricks for those who may be interested.
Sign up for a free Azure account.
Deploy GPT-5 via Azure AI Foundry.
Install VS Code
Install the CLINE extension.
Download your source from Replit and open it in VS Code.
Init CLINE memory bank.
Full disclaimer: there is a lot of “opinionated” stuff in the Replit agent that this will just not be able to replicate… But it is a solid alternative if you up your technical game.
This approach also has Intellectual Property (IP) protection. Your prompts will not be indexed to train the models like they do here at Replit.
So tempting right now. Since our last exchange this morning/last night, I am ready to throw my PC out of the window, with Replit open full page to see the ground come hurtling towards it.
UI/UX is the biggest delta that comes to mind. Credit where it’s due—Replit’s auto-generated UI is beautiful out of the box.
On my side, I’ve set up Spartan UI (a shadcn port for Angular) and can achieve similar aesthetics, but it’s more of a manual process. I’ve also been baking guardrails into CLINE’s memory bank to get behavior closer to what Replit provides natively.
Other differences worth noting:
Automation vs. Control: Replit handles a lot automatically, while Cline requires more explicit setup but gives you tighter control.
Ecosystem Integration: Replit is vertically integrated (editor, hosting, collaboration), whereas Cline plays more like a lightweight layer you can integrate into your existing stack.
Scaffolding: Replit often generates polished starter code and UI layouts immediately; with Cline, you have to guide it more deliberately.
Consistency: Cline with GPT-5 can be more predictable once you’ve tuned the memory/guardrails, while Replit sometimes favors speed over strict adherence to your architecture.
When I started planning my AI Dev Kit, I reviewed Lovable, Replit and through to various Cursor-style plays. And realised that Replit was the perfect middle ground for my non-tech founder audience. Tools like you are mentioning are great for us techies but most vibe coders wouldn’t have a clue where to start.
If it was just me I’d follow you today - it sounds really interesting. But annoyingly I’ve slightly baked my offering in to Replit - I can move, but will need to re-factor a lot of the workflow.
Btw, I’ve just created a new post for alternative ideas - I think the time has come for many of us to think about life outside.
Where do you feel like the major gaps are for non-technical users using that solution? I’ve read a lot about people using Claude Code on other forums. Lovable doesn’t seem there yet for what I’m doing, haven’t tried Bolt (someone said if you have a big app it’ll be expensive so I didn’t bother). I’d love to compare this and Claude Code, I’ve slowly became more technical over the past 8 months, but I’m still not enough on the technical side. If it has a preview pane, I might be able to manage though.
For my audience of non-tech startup founders, it is about a preview pane, and essentially being able to build without looking at a single code file - pure vibe coding. And other “friendly” tools for publishing, simple git, secrets, etc.
I always used to feel:
Lovable: for Sunday afternoon hobbyists
Claude Code, Cursor, etc: for developers/those with s/w architecture understanding
Replit: perfect middle ground for non-techies
But it is all moving so fast now (and not necessarily forwards!), I just don’t know any more.
To be fair to Replit, the pains they are putting us all through right now, will come from all the others too, at some point. As will the price hikes. Don’t try to convince yourselves “the others are cheaper and better” and switch just on that basis.
