How Remix Is Making Smart Contract Development Accessible

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you're not aware, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Rob and Stéphane from the Remix team. So if you're not aware, Remix is a rich toolset that can be used for the entire journey of smart contract development by users of any knowledge and a bit more. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Rob and Stéphane, learn about all the latest and greatest developments in the world of Remix, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Rob and Stéphane. I am so excited to have you guys on. Remix is one of the core staples a lot of smart contract developers, like myself, have used to get up and learning and experiment quickly. So I'm really, really excited to finally get you guys on the show here to kind of go through all the nooks and crannies of the product. But I guess before that, would you guys just like to give an introduction about yourselves?

Yeah, I'm the DevRel lead of Remix. I've been there since 2017. Remix has been going for a long time, and I was not the first person in Remix at all. So Remix has been going for a long time. And, yeah, so I've been seeing the evolution since then. Stéphane?

Hey, hi, everyone. I am Stéphane, and I am the lead AI developer at Remix. And I've joined Remix around about two and a half years now, and we've been making huge amounts of updates regarding the AI integration.

Amazing. And, yeah, that's awesome to see. Well, firstly, you've been around quite a while there in this project, Rob. That's almost nine years, nine years running. That's quite a bit of years in crypto years. Um, so you know the product really well in and out. And Stéphane, that's awesome to hear that you guys are on the AI train as well, integrating that into the product. I'm just curious, like, how did you both kind of get into the technology space and eventually find yourselves working on Remix?

Many years ago, I took a class at MIT called Telecommunications for Artists. And someone in the class ended up at the EF, actually as head of the EF. And then, but along the way, people were talking about Ethereum, and I started getting more and more curious about it.

And then was there a particular point of interest that pushed you to go down the rabbit hole to explore further?

Just a, I got a job here. It was like, oh, I got to get up to speed. And, yeah, so, you know, but the technology was so interesting that there was a lot to grab onto, so.

For sure. And we lost Stéphane there for a moment. Stéphane, are you still there?

Yeah, I'm still here.

Awesome, awesome. Yeah, so I guess the mic's passed to you, like, how did you start in technology and find yourself working on Remix?

So actually, it's quite a funny path, though. I started being like a traditional machine learning engineer or artificial intelligence engineer, training models from here to today. And then I always wanted to know how the blockchain is working. I mean, for every computer science student out there, at some point of time, you have this point where you might dive into some rabbit holes and say, okay, I really want to know what is actually going on here. Everyone is talking about it. And I happened to know Yann, who is actually the head at Remix, and we've been playing music together. And one day, some days he said, hey, you are a computer scientist, and maybe you can take a look at this. And this is how I got into it. And now it's been some years now, and it's been quite a ride, I would put it like this. Yeah.

Indeed, indeed. And, yeah, it's awesome to see kind of Remix, at least from the time I started using it back in 2020, 2021, kind of evolve into this broader educational tool and more. But I won't steal your guys' thunder. I'll let you tell the story there. But, yeah, I guess for folks who might be new into the world of smart contract development, what is Remix and what problems does it solve?

So usually when you get into contract development, you have to install this huge stack. It takes a lot of time, and then by the time you finish installing the stack, you forget what you're trying to do. So with Remix, it's an online IDE, or at least one flavor of Remix is an online IDE. So it's all there, and you can just start getting interested in, start investigating Solidity if you're doing that. You can deploy contracts. And a lot of projects link to Remix because they can show off their technology inside of Remix, or people give their clients even Remix to load up to check out their projects or to deploy, have the clients deploy. You know, it's an interesting tool because it's a learning environment, but it's also a development environment. We didn't like say, oh, you can just compile here. And because you can do a lot of the major blockchain operations in Remix and also do it with a visual interface, it has like an ease of use and it kind of promotes hands-on understanding of what's happening in this world that's a little sometimes hard to grasp.

Yeah. Stéphane, did you have something to add?

I can just, maybe to complete what Rob said, I mean, Remix IDE is just a normal IDE abstraction that offers a much more lighter and easier way to get into the Web3 environment. In the sense that you don't even have, as Rob was saying initially, you don't have to install a lot of tools. It's just bring up your contract, select the chain where you want to deploy a contract on, and then you are good to go. You don't have to install anything, and this is one of the powerful features that Remix actually has to provide.

Yeah, 100%. Oh, yeah, just so that these days with AI, the whole developer workflow is changing. And, you know, vibe coding wasn't here two, three years ago. So, and Remix as this prototyping tool and learning tool, you know, has to respond to vibe coders, to people, and people are learning in a totally different way now. But people still need to learn. So, the workflow is changing, you know, in Remix and in all other tools as well.

It most definitely is. And I guess, Stéphane, since we're on the topic of AI, what are some of the neat AI features you guys have introduced onto the platform?

There are actually a lot that I barely can concentrate myself on pick choosing one to expose to the public. But we are pretty much concentrating everything on automating everything, like making everything to be run by an LLM. Like, you can sit outside somewhere there and then just ask the LLM to even deploy a contract for you, to kind of write the contract, deploy it for you, and provide you with a dapp, with a dapp without even writing one single line of code, which is something that is pretty, pretty new to the environment, to the Web3 environment. So back then, you used to, I mean, with back then I refer to maybe six months or one year ago, you will have to vibe code your contract, vibe code your front-end environment, and maybe if you need a back-end and so on. Nowadays, you don't even need any of those. You just start with a prompt and then you get a full solution where you have a contract which is written for you, a contract which is deployed on a specific chain, and you also have a dapp, a front-end environment where you can actually communicate with your contract sitting somewhere. So in short, a one-prompt solution.

Also, in the, like most developers who are working on smart contracts, or not most but some, are like afraid of the front-end. And then with all this vibe coding tools, like front-end is part of it now. So now front-ends are part of Remix. And, you know, going from the concept, prototyping the concept all the way to the front-end is part of our workflow. So also a kind of interesting thing is like the hard part was just getting the thing to work. And now it's like, of course you have to get it to work, but you also have to promote it. And so I think that's why mini-apps are becoming important because they kind of give some visibility to devs who are just coming up with some ideas. And so in the Remix front-end builder, you can make base mini-apps there, or coming up, that's an upcoming project which I'll unveil in a few.

Excellent, excellent. And I guess that's a good segue. I know you both wanted to share your screens, so we can kind of get into that if you guys want to give us a showcase, a tour around Remix.

Okay, I'll start sharing the screen. It's also a little bit of a presentation, just a couple slides, and then kind of bouncing forth between that and demos. And for anyone watching us live today, if you have any questions for Rob or Stéphane, please bring those up and type them in the comments and we will address them as we go along here. So Rob, I'll be bringing up your screen here. All right, yeah, you're good to go.

Let's start the slideshow. There we go. So we've been working on a coming release, which will be, which is going into beta hopefully next week. And actually, we're looking for beta testers for this new release. So this new release has updated the Remix deploy and run panel, the debugger, but it's also has some new features. I mean, I guess one thing that we didn't get into in first part of our conversation was like Remix was an Ethereum Foundation project for until July. And so now we're on our own.

And so that means that we have to find some funding. And that means we're going to start, in this after this release is out of beta, we're going to have user accounts. And those user accounts are going to have cloud storage and increased MCP integrations and more LLM choice and chat history for AI chats. And the AI-assisted front-end builder. Also in this release are some revamps of the deploy and run and the debugger. But um, so we're like kind of venturing into user accounts and paid user accounts, so that would be Remix Pro.

So the MCPs are going to be like right now it's the Graph, so you can query a subgraph, Amp, the Graph's new database, some Alchemy, you can query blockchain data and get prices in the AI chat. And you can ask the AI to, you know, take an OpenZeppelin contract and adjust it in one go. Actually, Stéphane, why don't you demo this stuff?

Oh, you're on mute, Stéphane. Okay, sure. I can do the side demo. Let me just prepare this. Okay, then I share my screen.

Okay, I'm good to go. So this is technically the starting or the landing page that you will all get in the beta release or next week when we are done with the actual release. Rob, but the these specific tools are going to be after the full release, so after after it's out of beta. Yeah, that's true.

Okay, on your right hand side, you have the Remix AI assistant, which has been packed with a lot of features that connect deeply with the IDE, such as you don't have elsewhere. I mean, one of the particular reasons why you also need Remix is that this AI assistant in Remix is that other AI assistants such as Claude Code do not have such integration. And I will show you what I mean through that. Here we have a default workspace, whenever you select a contract, I mean, obviously you can also review that contract, but what we want to do, what I prepared for you is one, I mean, is generating a new workspace which will generate a contract for you or a workspace, I mean, an entire workspace for you with exactly what you want to have. Let's say you want to generate, Rob, do you have a specific, a specific prompt I can use?

Oh, the one I sent you about make a ERC20 with a limited number of tokens available to get minted. You know, so it's a customized ERC20, just an example of that.

Yeah, this one. We are making a new workspace that contain an ERC20 token that can have up to 10 token holders. Also, no more than 40 tokens can be minted. Now we generate and then the AI in the background is cooking. And the good thing about it is that the user is only getting a contract which is compilable, which has been reviewed for vulnerability, not holding any vulnerability. We help, I mean, yeah.

And he's also getting a compilable contract, so the user might not be fumbling around inside the contract trying to fix any error and so on. As you get the contract, as you can see here, you have a new workspace which is created, it is here. The name of the workspace, you can navigate through the files and watch pretty much everything. Now the thing is, you can ask the AI to compile the contract that it just generated. I mean, we already know there are specific MCP features that have been integrated in order to support this.

You can also ask the AI deploy the contract. Right now, it will be deploying this contract on the Remix VM. I mean, if you have MetaMask installed in your browser, you can also ask the AI to switch to MetaMask. You will get prompted in MetaMask access, access prompt so that the Remix will have access to your wallet, then you will be connected to the Remix environment and then you can tell him, okay, I want you to deploy this specific contract either on Sepolia, on mainnet, and so on.

And it will work with any browser wallet. Exactly, it will work with any browser wallet.

I mean, you can navigate there, browser extension and then, or WalletConnect in order to connect to any browser type. As you deploy the contract, there is new, very fascinated AI feature, which is creating a dapp for you. I can just say, okay, create me a dapp. Oh, I'll show, okay, I'll get into that one, Stéphane. Just if you could show the prompt so you can query like the state of the blockchain. Oh, yeah.

So that one's just an example of querying something that you couldn't do with Claude because it's going to query some blockchain data like, who owns or how many NFTs does this account own on ETH mainnet. So that you can't do that unless you're connected basically to the Alchemy API. So we're connected here.

I mean, in the background there are some MCPs that have been connected to Alchemy, which are actually operating on behalf, on behalf of Remix. And these are the holders, the different NFTs this address actually own. So with a simple prompt from the Remix environment, you can actually query the blockchain without even having to go to any specific provider and so on, which is also one of the envying feature we are providing right now.

Yeah, and I'll show the front-end builder now. Oh, but also you can show, I'll get into it too. Stéphane, can you just show, do you have the prompt history there?

Oh, yeah, I do also have the prompt history. We can go in the prompt history.

And this will be saved as part of cloud storage. So when you come back, or if you change computers and you log in, then you can check your prompt history. Provided that you are signed in into an account. Yeah, it will work. So that's the coming feature of user accounts, which involves, yeah, prompt history and also saving your workspaces in the cloud, so if you change your computers, you can always get access to it or using whatever.

So, I'll share my screen now. Sure. I'll remove yours and I'll bring, yeah, now you're sharing, Rob. Okay. So here's a little video of the front-end builder. Is it going? There. So he's deploying it to a public testnet. It's going to get deployed, and then, oops, er. So now, here's this, he's describing what he wants the dapp to look like.

And you can also upload an image or some a Figma file that would be the basis of the design. And you could create it as a base mini-app. And then for that, you have to like kind of go back and forth between the base app and Remix to register it correctly. And so then it spins it up. It's kind of, it takes a couple minutes, so I just kind of jump ahead. And then, and then you can name it. It deploys it to IPFS through Pinata. And then you can choose your subdomain here of a Remix in a subdomain Remix dapp.

And what else? Okay, so then, I think that's it for that part. So that's the storage one. And then, er. Oh, well, I had one up myself. But it was just a simple example of a dapp that had a URL that I chose or a subdomain that I chose. And I also wanted to do a kind of brief tour of the updates to deploy and run. Deploy and run had been there, you know, for a very long time, and the design had not been updated and the back end of it hadn't been updated and the same with the debugger.

So we updated the back end. So this makes it more modular. So basically, Remix has to is becoming a, you know, more agile tool. And if we need to kind of pivot to make deploy and run be embedded in other tools, we're going to be ready for that. And that's on the back end. On the front end, we're updating the design. So like if you want to switch to, you know, browser extension, you could do that. I mean, just the basically the look is a little bit different than it was. Um, and when you deploy it, now like the gas limit and the value is below the name of the contract. You can compile the contract inside deploy and run. Um, and you can select like the flavor of the EVM here as well.

And when you deploy it, when you deploy it, it's always something, you know. Live demos, man. Oh well, I maybe I just have to refresh it or something. Um, but I'll refresh it, but I'll go onto something else while that's refreshing. You know, this is like the bleeding edge too because this is not even this is I'm running it locally, and then we'll release it to the beta version and do some testing on it.

So there's the prompt stuff that we were just doing, the chat history. Oh yeah, so I definitely do need to get this going so I could show you what the debugger looks like. Wow. There we go. Okay, here we go. This is just the local version I'm running locally. And I actually speaking of this while I'm here, well anyway, so I'm going to select this contract, not even compiled, but because it's up here, I can see it here in deploy and run. I can compile it in deploy and run, um, and I can deploy it.

There we go. Don't know what happened before. Okay, so when you click it, you can see the functions like it was before. So it looks a little different. And um, oh, that's the sorry, that's the transaction recorder, which was a hidden feature before. This is now getting more prominent so you can save your transactions and replay them. But um, here now we're going to take this function, which is the one I just deployed, and we're going to save a number.

And then, did it execute it? And then we're going to retrieve it. And so the look is a little bit different. And now, we're going to make the see I don't know if people know these buttons here, but we've added them. Also you can expand the different panels in Remix, something that's come on in the past six months so that you can, if you want to make the chat, for example, very large, you know, click that and then it takes over the whole screen, or to make it back, make it back, at least. So anyway, what I wanted to get at over here was the debugger.

Because we just have a couple minutes left. I'm kind of speeding through it. But anyway, you can see the debugger changed size. And now when you select a trace over here, um, it's expanded, so it's wider here and it's taken over where the terminal used to be. And the states and the locals are here. Um, and you can step through the function as you could before. It's the layout is different providing more space. And you can still see the gas usage per line and you can also see the stack and see the opcodes as you could before, but there's more space. Um, and so you can step into those and step through those. So that's the quick debugger demo.

And I, yeah, so this beta release, we're looking for beta testers. So it's a call to put your emails in the chat if you're listening now, and we'll get a form up later so you could put your emails in and then we'll contact you and you can get access to these new features. Um, some of these features in the future are going to be paid features and um, so it's just to get a chance to get people to get some feedback about if you like these features, if you think they're worth it, and um, if you don't like them, you know, just to get feedback from people. So it's important to see what how people like this product.

100%. And, yeah, just just I think I'm done with the share. All right. Um, and just wanted to mention if um, folks didn't catch on earlier on, um, what Rob and Stéphane just demoed um, isn't live yet. So you just literally got Alpha into their Beta, so to speak. Um, so if you want to get your hands dirty um, on the bleeding edge, as Rob said, um, definitely get on their beta program. The form to to get on that will be shared shortly after. Um, however, the contact info for Rob um, as well on X is available um, on the description of the podcast today. So if you're eager to get going, um, I would say to reach out to Rob. Rob, beyond X, are there any other channels um, that folks can contact you on or Stéphane as well?

Yeah, well we have Discord server, we you can reach us um, through the Substack. You can you can even email. I hear you. Excellent. And then, yeah, you can send us a there's contact info in Remix.live or info website. Right on. And like I said, all that will be linked in the description below, so definitely give that a watch. Or give that a checkout rather.

And um, before we conclude, um, I just want to get both of your guys' opinion on um, as as I mentioned earlier, there might be some people who are watching this today, they might be just starting their um, learning journey for for smart contract development and what not. And as I'm sure you guys have seen, um, there's a lot of a lot of content out there um, and sometimes it's hard for someone to figure out what the best place to start is. Um, from your guys' experience, um, what would you recommend a beginner um, start with just to get their feet wet?

Well a very easy thing is just to go to Remix and then check out like the templates in the workspaces. And then you can also like pull any repo in, clone a repo into Remix of any code of smart contracts you like and then you can ask the AI like, what's this contract do? You can deploy it to the local test chain and start kind of playing with it, trying to figure out what's happening there. Um, so I definitely just like play with tools and play, you know, get the contracts, play with them, and there's also some tutorials inside of Remix called Learneth. Um, and on the homepage of Remix, you'll there's a button that says 'Start Learning' and then there's a nice Solidity intro there, but there's intros to a bunch of other projects and and there's also like videos inside of Remix. Um, and my favorite, I mean, I also like, you know, the Patrick Collins videos, I like Taz makes amazing videos for and very clear videos. He's smart contract programmer, I think on YouTube. Um, so those are the ones that I like. Stéphane?

Yeah, I'm sorry. On that note, I will tease what is actually come down the road. I mean, just as adding some stuff on top of what Rob already said, is that we are working on a copilot feature. And copilot feature will be a deep integrated AI who which will actually teach you. That will be a layer much more complexer, much more easier than what you can actually see right now on Solidity tutorial, the Learneth, something that will take you from your level, your level of understanding and also your pace and then teach you stuff in a very basic way. And yeah, this is what we are Actually, we should come back and unveil that when that's more fully baked out. Yeah. You're more than welcome, more than welcome, and I'm sure our viewers today would love that as well.

Um, but that's fantastic advice, and um, if you're someone that's looking to start their Web3 development journey, um, this this is the episode for you. Um, but with that, Rob, Stéphane, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day um, to come showcase all this alpha for us. Um, I'm sure a lot of viewers today are very eager to get on that beta list, start testing and playing around. Um, so yeah, we'll definitely keep everybody updated um, when the when that signup process is live. But if you're as if you're super eager to get going, um, I would say reach out to Rob, reach out to Stéphane over socials um, so you can hop hop that line, so to speak. Looking forward to having you aboard. There you go. And with that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Until then, have a good one, folks. Cheers. Cheers. Bye.