Bolt announces Bolt.diy as official Open Source fork — now you can use any LLM you want to build with Bolt
It feels like Bolt is at the point where they’re making major announcements almost daily at this point. And I‘m having a blast with it diving in trying everything they release.
Earlier this week Bolt announced that Supabase integration would be coming, and I’m in the beta for it which sounds like it could kick off today🤞
Of course, gone are the days of one announcement a week, Bolt’s moving so quickly, new releases and announcements are coming fast and furious. And Bolt’s second announcement this week is one I’m beyond excited about…which is why I decided to put together a little Medium article about it.
So…Open Source fork you say, what does that mean?
Open Source fork means forking a repo in Github, in this case, the Bolt repo. And of course, when people fork a repo, they often add some new bells and whistles…which is exactly what is happening in this case.
But before I go any further, I’ll need to talk to you about oTToDev.
Wait, who/what the heck is oTToDev?
That’s what you were saying in your head right?
So oTToDev is a project started by a guy named Cole Medin. He forked Bolt and added multi-model functionality so you can pick whatever model you want to use under-the-hood.
Cole started pumping out videos on You Tube showing oTToDev in action and quickly gained a bit of a cult following. As you can see from the image above, in oTToDev there’s a dropdown where you can pick the model and model version, in this case you cans see OpenAI and GPT-4o.
Ohhh, that’s cool — so what happened this week?
So this week Eric, the founder and CEO of Stackblitz/Bolt announced that oTToDev is now the office open source Bolt.new and it’s moving to a new home at Bolt.diy, perfect domain choice if you ask me.
As you can see from the screenshot above, when you go to Boly.diy it takes you directly to the Github repo where you can clone the repo and get things rocking locally.
There’s also a great discussion forum for anyone that wants to learn more from other people playing around with Bolt.diy, or who runs into an issue and wants help from the community. You can join at thinktank.ottomator.ai/
Oh and if you haven’t watched the announcement video with Eric and Cole I’d suggest checking out this tweet and watching it:
It’s moves like this that I think really set Bolt apart, they clearly care so much about the community and about empowering people to innovate in different ways with their technology.
IMO this is what differentiates a company that is focused on just selling a product and making money, and a company that is truly trying to change the world. Yes, that might sound a bit dramatic, but it’s true.
Think about it, Bolt doesn’t make money when you use something like Bolt.diy, instead you’re using their code and building with all of the amazing things that their team built, for free, or at whatever price you’re paying for the model you’re using.
I think this shows that Bolt really is the kind of company that thinks about making an impact, and they’re certainly doing that. I’m going to be diving into Bolt.diy and trying out as many models as I can to see how they compare so expect to see a follow-up post from me on this once I’ve had the chance to play around.
If you haven’t watched any of my “Building with Bolt” videos, here’s links to them below. In each video I walk through how to build with Bolt, but with a twist - I don’t have any prepared prompts, and nope, I haven’t tested them in advance, so you get to see me debug issues that you could run into yourself.
- Building with Bolt, Episode 1: Creating an NFT price tracking dashboard — Part 1
- Building with Bolt, Episode 2: Detailed debug session getting Bolt to play nicely with an API
- Building with Bolt, Episode 3: Two super handy Bolt tricks — Locking files and Extracting
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