The dawn of Agentic AI is upon us. Developers are getting lazy, working with just half of their brains and doing some complex stuff with the help of AI. A multitude of tools have popped up. All promising some truly wonderful stuff like automating the entire complex web apps with a single (or a couple more) prompts! 

Replit’s new Agent 3 makes it possible for developers who want to get projects done quickly without juggling a dozen tools to build more than just web apps. You can now create agents, set triggers, and connect workflows right inside Replit with nothing more than a prompt. Imagine setting up a weekly competitor news email automation that gathers updates, organizes them, and delivers them directly to your inbox. It works a lot like Zapier, n8n, or Lindy, only everything runs inside the Replit environment you already use.

Of course, we want to show you how to use Replit Agent 3 to automate web app creation with a few intelligent prompts. Why wouldn’t we? It’s a wonderful tool and, in our opinion, better than Lindy in many use cases. We will show you how to define your automation workflow or the triggers for your web app, submit your automation request, modify your workflow, and publish your web app in a few minutes rather than days. 

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

• Get started with Replit Agent 3
• Define your automation workflow or triggers
• Submit your automation request
• Make changes to your workflow and publish your app

So what are you waiting for? Let’s dive in together!

Step 1 - Get started with Replit Agent 3

Log in to Replit with an account. Here, you’ll see the familiar chat box to enter your prompt. 

Go to Replit.com and you’ll see a chat box to enter your prompt. Here, you have a variety of choices regarding what you want Replit to do. You can build web apps, you can build integrations, or agents and automations.

You can select web apps, websites, games, and other suggestions. Since we are going to show you how to use agents and automations, click ‘Agents & Automations.’ 

The basic plan is limited, but Replit offers everyone who signs up with some free credits, enough to build and test a basic workflow before deciding to upgrade. 

Step 2 - Define your automation workflow or triggers

Choose the trigger for your automation. What this means is that you have to select a service that will serve as the starting point for your automation. 

You can set up agents with different triggers, like:

• Slack
• Telegram
• Time-based
• Event-based (coming soon)

Let’s say you want to find out what your competitors are up to by listing any new articles or updates from their sites. For this workflow, select ‘time-based.’ This automation triggers at regular time intervals, which means it will keep running at the specified time until you turn it off. 

Use the following prompt to get started. The prompt has two parts. The first part is an instruction that asks Replit to send you a summary of any news about your competitors. The second part is an introduction to your business, the niche it serves, and the business category it falls into. 

Prompt: 

Every Monday at 10 a.m., please send me a summary of any news about my competitors that you find through a web search. We are Techpresso, an AI academy offering a weekly newsletter and tutorials, as well as guides on various AI services. Techpresso offers AI workshops, tutorials, and courses for professionals upskilling in AI.

It will start working right away. You can upload files, images, PDFs, basically anything to give Replit context about your idea. 

Step 3 - Submit your automation request

It will ask you whether you want to create an app or a design for competitor tracking. Click ‘Build an entire app’ and then click ‘Start building.’

It will ask you for your email address to deliver the results. Type your email address and click ‘Continue.’

Then, it will ask you whether you want to save this secret to your account secrets for easy access in other apps. Click ‘Add to Account Secrets.’

The agent actually shows you its thought process while it sets things up. In our run, it:

• Spun up a PostgreSQL database automatically
• Asked me for my API keys
• Moved step by step through the tasks:
• Checked system logs
• Created an email utility file
• Set up the time trigger, search, analysis, and summary nodes

Of course, we used the basic plan to create this automation. It’s not asking us to upgrade the plan to publish the app. Once you upgrade, you can preview and publish the app. 

The free credits are enough to try things out with one simple, working automation. After that, you’ll want to upgrade if you need to publish, preview the app, or build something more advanced. Mine ran out just from building and testing this workflow.

That’s it for this tutorial, Automation engineers! Be clear in your brief. Mention your niche (like “AI newsletter and education space”) and the competitor categories you care about. Also, remember to store your API keys in Account Secrets so you don’t have to repeat prompts or experience failed runs.