🔧 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?