Initial Thoughts on bolt.new

I've been playing around with Stackblitz's bolt.new, it's pretty impressive.

Here are some things I like:

• It's very simple to get started with plain English instructions for an app idea.
• You can connect to Supabase to use as your backend, bolt takes care of new setups and can modify databases, etc. with your explicit permission.
• You can connect to Netlify to use as your frontend. bolt takes care of deploying to Netlify.
• Bolt detects when there are errors being thrown by the app and offers to automatically fix them - and in my experience it succeeds, although it make take a few efforts.

Here are some things I don't like:

• There is no native integration with Git! This to me is crazy! I totally want my code, including the code bolt writes for me, to be in Git.
• Bolt describes what it is changing and the files it will work with but the actual code doesn't show a diff. I like how GitHub Copilot and Cursor both show diffs that one can then approve.
• I was able to click on Deploy before configuring Netlify, which was a bit confusing. It should prompt you to configure Netlify if you are trying to deploy but haven't.
  • Ideally bolt should support deploying to any valid node.js server, not just to Netlify.
  • It'd be great if at least Vercel was also supported.
• I've had instances where Bolt started failing to Deploy and didn't seem to know why. Closing out the project in bolt and then opening a new bolt instance seems to fix the issue.
• The chat history seems to be pretty limited. This isn't great as I'd like to be able to follow all the conversation from the beginning of the project forward.

I did subscribe. I ran out of the initial free tokens pretty quickly - but the subscription for $20/mo. gives me 10m tokens a day - which seems pretty generous.

I think this will become even more impressive when bolt gets better at not rewriting entire files and focuses only on those areas that need changes.

And those are my initial thoughts.

Have you tried using bolt.new? Thoughts on your experience? Any other tools you prefer?

Comments

[Dave Mackey]

If you haven't already found it, you may want to look at a browser extension called Supercharge that provides additional functionality in Bolt including:

1. The ability to use voice for prompting Bolt.
2. A prompt library that has useful prompts for various activities one may want to do repeatedly.
3. A Go-Live Checklist
4. A "Copy a Website" which will attempt to create a React copy of any page one passes to it.
5. API docs file which converts third party API docs into a single LLM-friendly file that can be added to the prompt.

There is also a "Component Library" but it doesn't seem to be working for me.

And there is a Component Selector functionality, but I think this might be unnecessary since Bolt recently added the ability to select specific elements in Bolt.

superchargebolt.com/

[Dave Mackey]

I tried using the beta "diff" view as I thought it might reduce the number of tokens I was consuming and it might have, but I also started to have a lot more issues with code breaking, so I reverted to the stable full file rewrite functionality.

In addition, I'm finding the fact that Bolt doesn't show me a diff of the code before/after it makes a change more and more troublesome as the prototype grows.

[Dave Mackey]

Another issue I'm running into is that it seems like every time I open the Bolt project in Stackblitz it is not remembering the github repo connection I made previously.

...and I don't see an option to add an existing repo?

[Dave Mackey]

I'll add to this that I recently had an issue where bolt started writing code in the chat window instead of updating the files...at least it seemed like it wasn't updating the files. I had to manually change back to the code tab before it started updating there again. Not a big deal, but a bit confusing and bolt didn't offer a helpful explanation when I asked.