I Typed This… and AI Built the App

What if I told you to build a fully functional web App in under 60 seconds without writing a single line of code? And not just a landing page. A fully functional web app with a database, user authentication, and everything. And it's live on the web. Today we have on Eric Simons, the co founder of Bolt, one of the hottest AI startups. And Eric's going to show us how to use Bolt to create an application that before would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make, and now it costs next to nothing. So if you've ever had an idea for an app before and got stuck because you couldn't code, you couldn't find a technical co founder, this episode is going to unlock so many new opportunities for you. So let's just jump right in.

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Eric, thanks for coming on the Next Wave.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here, you know, so.

I've been following Bolt for a long time. We have kind of a weird connection because the first time I saw Bolt was your episode with Greg Eisenberg. You know, Greg was one of our very first guests on the show. And actually when I was thinking about starting the show with my friend Matt Wolf in HubSpot, I went for a long walk with Greg here in Kyoto when he was visiting, and I was like, should I do this podcast thing? And he's like, yeah, you'd be great at it. You should do it. And I've been doing it for a long time. It's hard, but it's worth it. And so that's kind of like our connection through Greg Eisenberg.

I love it. That's awesome. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah. That was like one of the first podcasts I really went on after we had launched Bolt, and it ended up being huge. Like, we got just, you know, a massive number of people that ended up coming and trying out Bolt as a result of being on Greg. So he's like an angel in the company and that sort of thing now, too.

Oh, that's awesome.

He was stoked enough about Bolt was like, if you guys are raising, you know, I'd love to put in a chat.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Greg does also doesn't even invest in that many startups. That's impressive.

Maybe just a demo, a quick demo of like what Bolt is and like what, you know, what you can use it for and that sort of thing.

Yeah, for sure. Let's just do that. Just jump right into it.

It was almost a year ago. Exactly. We launched Bolt and the idea was like, you know, what if ChatGPT could actually make web apps, you know, and mobile apps, you know, now there's like a lot of these things that can do that, but Bolt was really the first one that could actually build full stack web applications just by like typing text in a box and hitting enter.

Right.

So I'll go and share my screen. We can like go ahead and use this thing. And Bolt's improved a ton, you know, over the past year since we originally launched it. But we've like stayed true to the roots of the thing of just having it be this really, really simple interface where you can literally, it's just a text box and you can type in what you want to build with it. You know, for the purposes of this demo, let's just say, you know, make me a dashboard for viewing company metrics or something. Right. And so you can imagine like a very common use case folks use for bolt or like PM's designers at companies that are using this instead of Figma to prototype out their applications. Because it's like way faster to just type in words into a box.

Yeah. And you can show something real that actually works and like it's easier to talk about that versus like some design file.

Exactly. Right. So if you kind of come back to like, you know, Marty Kagan wrote this book. You know, it's kind of like the foundational, like how to build products sort of book. I think it's called like Inspired if I'm not mistaken. But he had this concept of high fidelity prototypes. And really the core idea is if you're going to make a prototype, you want it to be as true to form as possible, to get the most highly accurate feedback from the end user on whether or not it's something they would use. And prior to this type of tool existing, the fastest way to create a prototype was dragging stuff around in Figma and then basically showing people JPEGs being like, does this look good? Which is better than nothing. And then it's like, if it passes that test, then maybe you get some engineers to like spend a couple weeks prototyping something that is a real application to put in front of them. But it just took too long it was too expensive to just.

Yeah, I feel like there could be so much loss in translation there too. Of like, you think you understand the idea, but then when you actually get your hands on it, it's like, oh, I don't really like that exactly.

Right. Bolt has to like, kind of flip that around where it's like you can just like come in and start prototyping an idea that's like a real application you can try out. Right. Like I just type some random thing in and it's gone ahead and, you know, kind of created a. A dashboard that we can like, look at with our different business metrics and like, whatever have you. And you can actually pull in like your company's design system to this thing. So it actually build applications and use the libraries your company does. So it's like on brand, right, with. With your company's apps.

How do you pull that in? Is that like, from like Figma or something like that as like a library of like, your fonts and colors and all that kind of stuff?

Absolutely, yeah. So you can actually pull it in from your figma. So if you go to the Bolt homepage, there's like a Figma button. You can paste it in there. Kind of cool is like, in front of any Figma URL, you can just put Bolt new in front of it and then it'll automatically suck it in. You know, if you have a coded version of your design system, like an NPM package or something, you can actually configure that in Bolt and say, okay, our design system lives in these packages in our NPM registry and it'll actually install from there and use those things.

Oh, that's awesome.

We're like one of the, I think the only company that actually allows that at this point where, you know, where we've designed it to be able to pull in from arbitrary registries, pull in from figma, et cetera. So, yeah, a lot of companies use us for, you know, rapid prototyping, et cetera and collaboration, you know, amongst folks on the team. And what's cool is like, as you get feedback, you can just go to Bolt and you can, you know, prototype and, you know, give it direction and say, let's like, make this optimized, you know, for mobile devices, you know, and use a blue color theme or something. Yeah, I don't know, you can keep interacting with it and chatting with it.

Right.

And building this interactively. So it's like very simple. You don't have to be technical to use the product. And so it's been a game changer, you know, across the spectrum for businesses, for like PMs especially, and even for entrepreneurs that are like going and building their first application ever and like trying to launch a startup on their own.

Cool. And I assume you get all the code for this too that you could hand off to a developer like once you prototyped it?

Yep, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And to me that's like one of the most magic things about this entire transition happening where you can have AI just spit out actual code. This is using again the same code your company does or you know, if, you know, if you're starting a company, it's using like React, which is like typically the default choice or whatever have you. You can instruct it to use anything for that matter. But yeah, you can take this code. We actually have an integration with GitHub so you can like commit this to a repo and like have it be committing there. We have integrations for deployment and that sort of stuff built in. So this is not like some proprietary thing like you know, maybe WIX or Squarespace. Right. Sort of is. This is like something that's actually really focused on real workflows and use cases.

I was kind of thinking about like who is your competition? I mean, I know there's like lovable and vercel v0 and then obviously there's ides like you know, Cursor and Windsurf and there's agents like Devin and Factory. I am kind of wondering like where this all goes and like do they all converge in some way or are they all serving different markets? I kind of see Devin and Factory a little bit more targeting enterprises, enterprises that also have engineers. It feels like with what you guys are doing is great for like replacing the website builders and things like that, but maybe you're thinking about it totally different than I am.

I think that it's somewhat the website builders. I think for us we're very focused on having this be a tool that people are using for rapid product development. So again, I think like the figma use case of like we're making prototypes, giving feedback and iterating. That strikes me as really our lane and where we are having really, really great results. We have two ICPs that we see on our prosumer side. It's largely filled with people that are entrepreneurs building their startups, that sort of thing. On the B2B side it's entirely like PMs at companies doing rapid prototyping and they're kind of largely the same use case both sides There are trying to iterate towards great products. The prosumer side of it though, they really, really care about having production grade hosting and things of that nature, which like the businesses also care about in regards to like creating real prototypes they can share internally and that sort of thing. There's just a little bit of weight emphasis difference between what these two different types of users are doing. But it's like kind of a classic product led, you know, growth sort of motion for us.

And do you guys provide any kind of hosting or anything like that right now or. No.

Yeah, so by the time this is like, so tomorrow we're actually announcing this, but basically we have actually integrated hosting directly into the product. I'll go and hit publish, so. Oh yeah, this is. Okay. So this is actually time production. I'm feature flagged right now, so we get to see it actually in action. This breaks, by the way, it's because I'm feature flagged and this is like going, yeah, sure. But what's really cool about what we're up to here with hosting, a lot of the tools today for Vibe coding, like they're very fun, they're kind of like, they're fun toys, but they don't actually set you up to build and scale your product. Two millions of people, even thousands of people. There's been a lot of stuff in the news around databases being deleted by other folks and like security issues, et cetera. And a lot of the issue is that the Vibe coding tools, like the web based ones, like Lovable and Replit and whatever, the way that they've approached hosting your applications that you make is that they've kind of tried to home roll their own hosting infrastructure. And the problem with that is that all these companies are about the same size. Like we're like 45 people. So is Lovable, so is Replit. If you're going to go and scale databases and servers and DNS to do it well and reliably for actual businesses, it's a whole business in itself. And so what we ended up doing is we have partnered with netlify and Supabase, which are some of the best companies in the world for databases and hosting. And we've actually taken their offerings and for the first time ever like brought it underneath one interface, like one seamless experience inside a bolt where you're not even like, you're not signing up for a netlify or Supabase account. It's actually just part of Bolt. Like every Bolt project has its own production, hosting and database associated with it. So when you Create a project on Bolt, it automatically has those things and it's being scaled and supported by Netlify and Supabase with us. And so you can actually go and scale things to millions of concurrent users. Right, with these different tools.

Yeah.

So Bolt is actually like really the first Vibe coding tool that's going to actually have this amazing type of idea to million sort of experience, right?

Yeah. That's amazing. So it feels like you guys could really, in theory dominate like 0 to 1, basically. Right. Like when you're, when you're creating something new. And I can see why Greg invested in this. You know, he's got the whole idea of Marketplace and all that.

Right.

So you've got an idea, you want to create something whether you're an individual or at a company. And it sounds like you guys could be the best at that. Like just from idea in your head to like, it's. It's now a real thing and it's actually published on the web, which is awesome.

Yeah, exactly. And you're spot on, which is like the people that are primarily using Bold are not developers. Right. When you look at Cursor, the inverse is true. Like, nearly everyone using Cursor is a developer.

Yeah.

The people that are using Bolt are people that have great taste in products and business. Right. And they have good intuitions around those things, but have never had the technical knowledge on how to actually build, you know, a product themselves from the ground up as far as like writing code and that sort of thing. And so Bolt for them is really their tool to actually go and take direct control of the building their products and experiences. And to that end, it's been a very important part of that. And this is like a lot of the growth of the other guys too in the space have been seeing from this type of archetype. But the issue is it's not just about building a prototype or building an app. You have to have this thing wired up to be able to actually be secure and actually be able to scale and like not have these crazy obvious holes.

Right.

So then that just strikes us as it's important to have as a first grade thing in the experience. We are actually hosting Bolt on Bolt hosting. Like, we use the exact same stuff for this and even Lovable also uses the same stuff as what Bolt hosting is. Right. The tagline is you can go from idea to production or whatever in a prompt. If the Vibe coding tool itself is not using their own hosting, that's like a. It's a big red flag and there's Been a lot of this where, like everyone's saying the stuff is secure and stuff, but it's like, I mean, if you really believe that, like, why are you kind of selling people one thing and not actually using it yourself? Right. It kind of goes to show though, like, where what we think is important from the user experience, help people actually get their ideas online in a secure way that will actually scale.

I think that's awesome.

Yeah.

In Silicon Valley, there's a huge bias towards engineers, which, I mean, I love engineers, I code myself a bit. People who were like, great at business or marketing or sales, they were at such a disadvantage. If you do have an idea, okay, now you gotta find developers and pay them at least 10 grand, maybe 10, 20, whatever, to build some kind of prototype of something really simple. And you have no idea what they're doing. You have no idea if they're like, how much they're charging you, if any of it makes sense, if their timelines make any sense. And then maybe it doesn't work. Like now instead of that, you're gonna have a world where someone who's good at talking to people or has good ideas or is a good at doing social media marketing or whatever, they can have an idea and just start talking to Bolt and then the website's live and then they can just go test it, they can go share it. If it doesn't work, you try something else. I've told people that, you know, people don't realize, like, you can launch a lot of things now. People used to be worried about like launching something and it failed and like, oh my God, people are going to think you're a failure. People forget things like a week later now. You literally were just trying new ideas and seeing what works with something like Volt.

Absolutely.

Look, Vibe coding is the fastest way to go from idea to shipped product and most marketers are completely sleeping on it. And here's what's wild. HubSpot just dropped 10 vibe coding prompts that'll take you from I have an idea to an actual working product in hours. You get the complete zero to ship framework with prompts at every stage from ideation, technical optimization and scaling. It's the entire package. Get it right now. Click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show. For, like, people that are entrepreneurial, I think this is the best thing really in the past decade that's come out as far like the capabilities of being able to iterate this fast. Because, like, to me, I look at early stage entrepreneurship, like finding Product, market fit. It's purely a numbers thing. Like, it's at how many shots on goal can you take? Like how many iterations can you take.

And how fast too, right? Like, the speed matters a lot.

Bingo. Right? Your speed dictates how many shots on goal you get. Right? And this increases that by like an order of magnitude. That, to me, is like, why every entrepreneur should be using these things, because it's never been faster to go invalidate or invalidate the ideas that you have. And heck, you don't even necessarily, if you're not a technical person, you don't even need to necessarily be technical to go and actually do this. And we've had like just, you know, from what we hear from our own users, we've had just dozens and dozens of startups that have used Bolt to build their mvp, go and prove it out, and have gone and raised their seed rounds to continue scaling their company out. And I love hearing that because, I mean, what, like a great enabler, you know, and all the integrations we're building in as well, like what we're doing with like our Bolt cloud offering stuff, again, it's like these are things that if it wasn't just built in, you'd have to go and figure out how to set these things up and get them all configured and da, da, da. And then if you're not technical, it's like the agent's not going to know how to use these other things. Right. So having that all built in, it's like, now you can come to Bolt and be like, hey, buy my domain. Like, deploy that thing to production, go and add this feature and just knows how to do all this stuff across all of the infrastructure that you don't even know what it is and how it works, but it does, right? And you can build a business. Like, amazing.

Yeah, it is amazing. Yeah, it used to be. I remember, like, even like learning how to set up a domain properly and dealing with DNS was like a skill, at least for me back in the day. I was like, okay, I have to learn how to do this. Just mess with the DNS and everything. It was a pain. I think it's probably a good moment to talk about the hackathon because it fits really well into talking about all the new opportunities for people to be able to create things. So maybe tell me about the hackathon and if know, show me some examples as well. Like what's, you know, what people build.

Yeah, so back in, I think it was like March or April, this guy Kp who runs the startup stuff over at Paddle. He tweeted out this idea. He's like, if I was the CEO of Bolt, I would throw the world's largest hackathon and have a giant cash prize, have Guinness World Record, actually like validate the world record title. Just as a lightning rod to like get entrepreneurs and builders to come and actually try out, you know, these new tools like Bolt. A lot of people are not aware that they can actually go and build startups and, you know, tech products themselves with Bolts and other things. And so I tweeted back, I was like, cool, let's do it. I didn't know who he was, but I was like, let's do it. And a couple hours later, we had like over a million dollars of commitments and the thing went like viral on Twitter and whatever. And so we got roped in running the world's largest hackathon. Which I will tell you in retrospect, I mean, it was heck of a lot more work than I would have ever expected. But it was, it was, it was incredible. Like we had, I think we had like over 130,000 people that participated in this thing. And the top folks that won the thing, it's, you know, it was amazing. Like, I think the first prize was like 100 grand. The second prize was like 75 or 50.

Did you say 130,000 people?

130,000.

Wow.

Huge. Massive. Massive. It was just, it was just crazy. Yeah, our cloud and inference bills were through the roof.

But yeah, it was, it was such a cool initiative that we ended up doing because there's so many, I mean, just so many people that came from all different walks of life and backgrounds. Some people that were engineers, most people were not. They had never. And they were just like, hey, I'll give this a shot. Like, I'll go and, you know, build something cool.

And so this hackathon was all in person. They all had to be there.

It was all global, actually. Yeah, it was global.

Oh, okay. Okay.

We had an in person components kick the thing off. The chain smokers threw a concert for this. That was how this thing kicked off, believe it or not. They're like investors in our company. And so in San Francisco, there was a concert to kick off this hackathon, which is pretty cool. Other than that, it was like pretty much online line though. Yes. I fell the one first place super cool guy, he made a AI app that actually lets you like edit videos with AI. So like, I, I don't know if you've done a lot of video editing. It's kind of monotonous a little bit.

Yeah.

And so it's like the idea of having an AI integration or agent where you can actually just tell it, hey, like, go and take these parts, clip them together, and d d. It just like, does it pretty magic, right? Right. We ended up making, you know, a actual app for this.

That's cool. You know, I own lore.com and there's been so many people who've told me, nathan, you should be doing that with Lore. That's what Lore should be.

It's a really good idea. You know, it's really sophisticated application, actually, because he had a full timeline scrubber and everything. And I mean, it was like a full on, you know, project.

And he used Bolt for all of this.

Yeah, Bolt was the tool that he used to primary. So you can kind of see, like, this is not super trivial stuff to make here, right? Especially in the course of just like a month, like, pretty wild. So you can chat with it and actually tell it to edit it and whatever have you. But it was like, this is like a reasonably sophisticated application. Right? This is like a real startup. I mean, you think about, like, a couple of years ago, the idea of one person building something like this is this would have taken, like, a year to build solo. Right. But, you know, made this, you know, entirely through prompting. This is the guy that won first place, and then on second place was this guy, his name Serge. So he made this app called Weight Coach. And basically the idea is it allows you to take control of, like, what you're eating and to, like, help create recipes for you based on the ingredients you have and help you, like, you actually get down to, like, the target weight that you're looking for. It actually uses AI to go and, like, create recipes and create different aspects of the experience, which is, like, really cool because there's like, these weight loss apps, you know, that you can download. But his is, like, I thought was very interesting because it was something where it actually got to know you and, like, your preferences. And it wasn't like, hey, here's like, five different recipes that are, like, hard coded into this thing. It's like it can actually go and dynamically adjust to, like, oh, I'm traveling. Okay, well, here's something you could do in that area, blah, blah, blah. Right. So very, very cool app that he made. And this is actually a native mobile app. So this is not just like a web app, it's actually a native app, which is something unique that Bolt is the only one of the only web based tools where you can like make a native iOS or Android app with the thing. Yeah. So these are a couple of cool hackathon projects that came out of that.

Oh, very cool. That's awesome. I was sitting there thinking when you were talking about this, I was remembering back that one of my cousins in Alabama was asking me like, hey, I've got this idea for an app. You know, I used to have tons of people in my family like, you know, because I knew I was, you know, having some success in San Francisco and they're like, I have an idea for an app and you know, how would I make it or how would I get started? And I was like, you gotta go learn this programming language for like a year. Are you gonna learn whatever and then maybe make a prototype and it's probably not gonna work. And I just told him that too. I was like, probably not going to work. You got this idea. It sounds great. You probably should do it though because you're going to learn a lot. And you know, and I do wonder like if that would have changed things if they could have just like went to something like this and just tried it and in a day saw if their idea had any merit or not. You know, that been awesome.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I think. And that's like, you know, to my co founder and I, he and I actually grew up down the street from each other in the suburb of Chicago and he and I learned how to code together when we were like 13 and we've been building stuff together ever since and awesome. It's like we look at this, we're like, we're building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13 years old because it's so painful to have to learn how to program from scratch. And the drop off is just huge. Like a lot of people have interest in this stuff, but just to do anything, it's like there's all this random kind of archaic things almost that you have to become good at that's really ancillary to the point of actually building something.

Yeah. And then you're just getting started. That doesn't mean you're going to have any success at all.

A hundred percent, 100%. And so I think that it seems, and this is like Greg says, this vein of thinking a lot, but like this is just, we're already starting to see an explosion here of ideas and products that just would have never existed before because the sheer drop off that inevitably happens if you have to know how to set up dev environments and how to code and then getting good at coding to the degree you can actually make something that's beautiful and secure and can scale and stuff. I mean that's like, it takes years to even just get to that point and then you get to start taking shots on goal on an actual way.

Right, right, right, right.

So yeah, I mean it's, it's just transformative. Right. The dynamics of startups in general, you know.

Yeah. I guess my mind was like going like, should they be doing something like almost like competing with YC in some way where like they're like subsidize people and teach them how to do business and then use Bolt. I don't know, just like random idea off my head.

It's a great point. Right. Like we've been kind of kicking around the ideas around this because in the hackathon was, was like really our first foray into this where it's like, how do we go and like foster entrepreneurship on our platform? Right. Because we think this is one of the most exciting unlocks that this thing has. And the hackathon was kind of the first way and we've been exploring what would it look like to have something that's like more ongoing, like maybe it's like an accelerator built in or I don't know, things of that nature. Right, Yeah.

I know you've talked about this before, but maybe if we could briefly go into like how that happened, like from like Stack Blitz to Bolt. Because I feel like I heard of Stack Blitz, I think I did on Twitter or something at some point, I'm not entirely sure. I think, you know, and definitely like I saw Bolt in the early days, like when you guys first launched and stuff.

Yeah, totally. I'll do the quick 0 to 60. But yeah, back in 2017, Albert Pye, my co founder and I, he and I launched Stackblitz, which is web based ide. And the idea was really we wanted to make it as easy to build like full stack web applications as it was to use Figma or Canva. The idea, I guess kind of started because back when we first came to the Valley in 2011, 2012, we'd had the good fortune of bumping in Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were first starting Figma. And you know, back then like they didn't have a design tool. Like the initial pitch was like this demo of a 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the pitch went basically along the lines of like, you know, browsers have become very powerful. You can now do complex Graphics rendering in them. And so like if you can create a rendering engine that runs in a browser, you can bring design to the browser in the same way that Google brought Docs and email, et cetera. And that'd be hugely valuable. But obviously we've seen how that story has played out now. And so back in 2017 we saw for the first time like, oh, it might be possible to do that same play but for development environments. So for the first time you can actually mount dev environments in a browser using the end user's cpu, memory, et cetera. And that would be huge. For the same reason was for Figma and Google Docs and whatever have you. We started the company in 2017, we launched that technology in 2021. A lot of developers thought it was very cool. But over the couple of years after that we had millions of developers using the product for free every month. We just could not get anyone to pay us money. And that was by and large, if you think about what's really the difference between Stackblitz and Bolt. Stackblitz was an IDE where you still had to know how to code. You didn't have to set up your environment, but you still had to know how to code, which is huge.

Yeah. When you were saying that, I was like, to me that would have been great for maybe competing with Codecademy kind of thing where you're actually teaching people to code or something.

Exactly. And it's funny because we started stat Booth because we were competing with Code Academy on our previous company in a sense, like we were teaching people how to code online, needed an online environment to do that. And that's really where Stackblitz kind of popped out. But there wasn't an obvious way for us to make money or at least the things that seemed obvious. We tried. All the other competitors tried. No one figured out how to make money on cloud ideas in any meaningful way. It was just a mirage. And so that coming to last year, we've been around for seven years as a company, you know, if we can't figure out how to make a venture scale business, like it just doesn't and we don't have a clear paths to doing so, like what are we doing here?

Right.

And so the decision was made, like if we don't have something by the end of the year, you know, that's like changes the trajectory. We're going to start spinning down the company or getting acquired or like whatever. Right. And so what we ended up doing is we launched a couple of different products last year. All of Them were very cool. But, you know, the first couple we launched didn't get the commercial traction that we were, you know, hoping to see. And, you know, when we launched Bolt, it was the last experiment that we were going to run. We were launched in October. Our board meeting was in November, where we were going to, you know, begin disassembling the company.

And what ended up happening.

Hey, surprise, guys. We got this. This Bolt.

Yeah, yeah, totally, right? I mean, it was. It was, yeah, unexpected for literally everyone at that point. We've been around for seven years and we got to like 700k of ARR. And then we launched Bolt. In the first 30 days, we added 4 million of ARR. And then the month after that we went to 20 million. It was crazy. And so it's like. And there's a lot of these stories now. These companies that are. That can. They're seeing these, like, revenue ramps like we did, but we were really the first one that actually saw that type of hockey stick. And we're like, what the hell is going on? That was how Bolt came to be is. It was an idea I'd had earlier in the year. And then once we saw the Sonnet 3.5 model from Anthropic, I was like, okay, this is actually. The coding models have really caught up. And this, this would be an interesting product. We had no idea it would be as well loved and received. It has been and grow as fast as it has been. Like, we thought we would add like the best case scenario in our you was if we add 100k of ARR by the end of the year off this, that would be amazing. And we cleared that, I think on like the first or second day or something, you know.

Wow.

Yeah. Anyways, that's kind of the story of. Of how Bolt came to be.

Well, dude, that's, you know, congrats on that. I mean, like, the fact that you did that for seven years and it sounded like you were just like hustling and like, you know, barely holding on and, you know, then had this huge success. That's amazing.

It actually relied on the technology we had made the in browser dev environment stuff. Like when you go to Bolt, all that technology we made over the past seven years, like, that is what is actually making that possible. We built Bol in 90 days because we had spent seven years building this technology to run dev environment. So it was a very natural product progression. Actually. It was really effectively like a UI change and a little like a rebranding because instead of an ide, you have a Chat box, you know. But yeah, so it was very natural actually.

Cool. I'm curious, you know, which model are you guys using right now, like primarily like with Bold? Or have you switched over to GPT5 or are you still using Claude or.

Yeah, we primarily use Claude. I mean, we found Claude to have generally for when you, when you're, you know, doing co generation stuff. Like Claude has the best models. We've also. We were one of the launch partners on GPT5 and GPT5 is a great model. I think there's certain areas where we're using it, but Anthropic has just done a really good job of really lasering in on software Cogen and just being the best in the world at that. And they're doing a lot of interesting stuff there where I suspect that they're going to be the preferred tool for some time. Maybe other things will come, but it seems like that's really the niche that they're focusing on and focus matters a lot.

Yeah, yeah. I went on vacation for a few days and I came back and like Twitter was full of like all this, all these people arguing over GPT5 and some people were like, you know, it's amazing. Other ones like, it's horrible. And this is like the end of AI. It was all a big bubble, we're all done for. And I was like, what the hell? What did I come back to? What did I come back to?

What the.

You know, I tried GPT5, it seemed really good. Like, you know, not like a gigantic step forward, but like a nice step forward. I thought it was really smart how they had like switched to like an automatic model because like for the average person the UI was horrible and then now everyone's basically like forced them back into having the same kind of UI again or similar. I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on AI progress?

It depends on like kind of the.

Dimension of IT coding and like building applications.

Yeah, I think on coding I think there's very meaningful improvements that we've witnessed across model to model, especially across the Anthropic family just over the past year. Like it seems like the RL stuff that's going on there has legs and has a lot of room to run.

Looking at the more AGI stuff, I think that all these things are kind of reliant on new approaches being invented and proven out. Right. So I think on the current, if you kind of take the current state, the whole idea of like scaling things up like that has topped out. But you know, the adding like the reasoning and you know, RL stuff has kind of moved the needle a bit in a way that you couldn't have forecasted. So I think we might see more stuff there. But it's like, you know, kind of a tbd.

Yeah, I guess it's kind of hard to know if that's also going to like cap out too. Like the, you know, the thinking, the reasoning side, is that going to continue to scale up or is that also going to have diminishing returns? It's kind of hard to know.

It might, right? I mean, I think there's just going to have to be a lot of new research and invention done. But I think even with the current state of the stuff, we're looking at a lot of the games like moving away from like, do we have the best model? And kind of moving more towards do we have the best model that's designed to work well with agents? Right. Because if you think about like how a human brain works, it's kind of rare. We're just like off the top of your head. On any given sufficiently complicated question, you will just zero shot an answer that is completely perfect.

Right.

And it makes sense that maybe we can get machines to be at that point. But it seems like a pragmatic way to approach this is like, you know, that's maybe the North Star or whatever, but like the way in which people think is by bouncing things around and going back and forth. And that's like what agents do. Like Claude code is going and looking at different files and like kind of digging in and sometimes it'll hit like a dead path in like what it's trying to figure out and it'll revert back and like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so to me it's like the area where the innovation is ripe and it's like early days is really making that sort of critical thinking really, really good and making good at tool calling and like for building agents and that sort of thing. And so I think it actually kind of matters less about the specific model capabilities because even with like some of the frontier models, like I just, I don't think we're really maxing out what they can do. If you actually have a really good agent that's orchestrating this, but that also relies on the models themselves being trained to be, to work better as agents. I think there's some number of years where just focusing on that is going to yield some incredible results, I think.

Yeah, it seems like that plus more compute and we'll get like amazing progress for at least like three to five years for sure. You could argue that AGI is like 20 years away or like we've already reached it, like depending on your definition. I mean.

Yeah, yeah. And I think too it just, it's going to take time for the application layer to actually fully utilize even the current state of the art. Right. So I think that there's not actually to me an urgent need for these things to go like 10x better tomorrow. There's real revenue coming into us and other companies and there's a lot of new innovation happening that's not even related to the models getting better. So from that end I think it's going to be transformative on just how the world operates without really needing some giant step function in any short period of time.

Yeah, I think the average person doesn't even realize how good the, the current models are. They're just using it like a basic chatbot or Google for sure.

And there's just not a proliferation of products that are really leveraging these things to the max and integrating into people's workflows. Like it's taking time. Right. And that's like the same thing we've seen with every other wave of technology where it's like the adoption of cloud services, you know, adoption of the Internet. It's like it kind of takes time for there to be proliferation of these, of the builders who are delivering the services and the consumers that are purchasing them. Right. And there is, it is faster than it ever has been in previous cycles. But even still it's again coming back to like for our products, like most people don't know that they can write software now. Right. And so like the Tam is like 98% of the planet.

Right.

There's not even 100 million people that are using these. There's not even like 20 million people.

Yeah, I do wonder how you reach those people. Like even if you just told them they like they wouldn't be able to process it. Like that was actually real, that you could just go type in and it would make a website for you or an application, whatever. Like people have a hard time, you know, grasping that.

Yeah, exactly. And so, and again, a lot of this is like, it's, it's really people, builders and entrepreneurs need to go and solve the last mile problems of these things at the application and distribution side of this problem set. And so for those reasons I feel like everyone, and maybe in large part because of some companies that have been just like hammering about AGI for the past five years or whatever, but you know, it's like, I think there's some expectation. It's like AGI or bust.

Right? Right.

This isn't zero sum, right? Like this is not zero sum. Like maybe all paths lead to that, but like that's not needed. Like, if you look at software development specifically, what is the value of going and like creating products that, whose purpose is to like go and basically rewrite all of the world's software? Right. I mean that's like, that's what we're talking about here. Like with bolts and other products, you can go and just build new software that replaces previous human written software. The market size of that is like trillions of dollars. You can rewrite how the world works with just basically the current state of technology. And if it gets better, it's just going to happen faster. Right?

Yeah. Me and Matt did an episode early on in the podcast where we were talking about the implications for the software industry. And I was talking about like the refactoring of software or like rewriting of software. Even like the government, like the, some of the software they're using, that's like.

That'S been there for like 30 years.

Because it's just like, well, we didn't know how it was written in the first place, we don't know how to change it. We're scared to touch things. There's so many complex things like that that AI is definitely going to be able to help us do. And I think that's the kind of stuff the next five years all become realistic.

Totally. So that's kind of my take on like, you know, what's progress or not, or like, but I think just like pragmatically it's like we haven't even scratched the surface of the current level of capabilities as far as applying it into the world and then it's still improving. And that's crazy because again, even with the current state of the art, there's so much more to be done.

Yeah, I'm convinced also, like if you ask people like 10 years ago, if you show them what we have today, they'd be like, you've got AGI. Like I think a lot of people actually would be calling what we have today AGI. But anyways, there's two questions I'd like to ask people, just like kind of for fun as we end the podcast. And one is I have 11 year old son. I'm constantly thinking of, you know, what should I be teaching him? And I know apparently this has become a pretty common question that people in Silicon Valley ask each Other if you had a son, what would you be teaching your son? Would you still be teaching him to code? Would you be teaching him like, hey, use things like Bolt and just go create your ideas?

Yeah, good question. Yeah. So I've got a one year old daughter, so she's not at the point where I can be like teaching her use Bolt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think like in a couple of years, I mean, I will absolutely have her going and using Bolt if she likes to build things at least. Right. It's. This is amazing. I mean, you know, the reason that we, we give kids like Legos and like Tonka trucks instead of actually putting them behind a forklift is that it's just, it's not safe to like give kids access to the real tools that professional use. Right. That's not true anymore. Right. Like, and there's also, of course it's, it's not safe and there's a huge learning curve. Right. Even if it is safe.

Right.

And when you look at things like Bolt, neither of those things are a problem.

Right.

But we have people of all ages coming and using both of all skill types, of all backgrounds. And to me, it's like often people don't end up becoming engineers or looking into building things or being entrepreneurs because they don't get exposed to what it actually is about because the drop off is so big. And I think that's, to me why it's important for my own child, like to use Bolt or things like it is to go and experience what it's like to build stuff for yourself. Right. And so that would certainly be one of the main things.

But she's one, so should she learn to code or not? Or will that be totally irrelevant in 17 years?

To me, it's like, it's all like, I think learning how to code is still a great thing to learn. Right. Because it's like your ability to really understand what's happening at a lower level with these tools. That's always, always been helpful in this profession.

Right.

And I think that's going to continue to be the case. But assuming you want to, like, this is what you want to work on. Right. For, for as a career, other things too is I think arts are cool. I think going and learning how to sing and dance or whatever is fun or sports and that sort of thing, those are the main things I think all of my own kid, I would encourage them to go dig into.

Yeah, that's a good answer. Okay. You get into a time machine, you're in San Francisco you step out, it's 2050, what do you see? Like, is it dramatically different or is it like, you know, robots everywhere and, you know, or is it just like pretty much the same? Is it.

I think I would expect it to be the same in some ways, but I think we tend to get like the frontier technology way faster than the rest of the world. So like, I remember when I moved here from Chicago back In early, like 2010, 2011, Uber was just a, just becoming a thing then.

Yeah, yeah, me too. I was there. Yeah, I saw Travis at a party, like when it was first starting.

Yep, yep. And so I was using Uber all the time in the Bay Area and I went back to Chicago to visit my family in like 2012 and like it was like, there's, there's no Ubers in the entire state.

And, and so it's stuff like that where I think, I think the, the Bay Area is going to have, they're gonna have I 2050. It's going to be robo taxis or whatever and like robots delivering food. I think it's going to be probably the epicenter of what that stuff looks like. I would imagine. And I would imagine there's probably a lot less cars on the road in that sense, or at least non robotic ones. But that would be maybe my base expectation of the thing because we already see that now. It's like we were the first to have Waymos and so I suspect by that time it's probably going to be the de facto way of getting around or whatever.

Yeah. Well, dude, Eric, this has been awesome. Where should people find you online and anything like that you want to share?

Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, like Bolt is like Bolt new. That's the domain. You can find me on Twitter, just Rick Simons and on LinkedIn in you can search Eric Simons. I guess how that works, but it's.

Like forward slash in or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like there's like a UTM tracking code you need and all that. Yeah.

So yes, you've been awesome. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Yep.