I’m at the point where I now use Bolt.new daily, it really is that good

I started using Bolt.new shortly after it launched and was instantly impressed. As a heavy duty Cursor user I thought nothing else could possibly capture my attention the way that Cursor has…but Bolt honestly changed that.

First, in around the September time frame I was so impressed with Cursor that I moved our engineering team over to it. Most people were using VS Code so this was a pretty seamless move. I set us up with a business account so everyone got all the bells and whistles and pretty soon I was having engineers on my team share stories of different things that Cursor helped them with and how amazing it was to see it in action.

Of course, we’re not alone here, and not do sound dramatic but in all honesty, any company that isn’t allowing their eng team to use AI coding tools is just going to move slower, sorry but it’s true.

So then comes Bolt, which I’ve heard some people call a Cursor-killer, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate or necessarily what Bolt was designed to do. Here’s how I currently see these two solutions, both of which definitely fall into the AI coding space, but in different ways.

Here’s the key difference.

I see Cursor as a tool existing software developers will use to write better code faster.

I see Bolt as tool that anyone can use to build apps.

See the difference?

Of course, there’s a nice interplay between the two and that’s why I’m finding myself using Bolt daily.

What Bolt does a great job of doing is rapid prototyping. Rather than just writing a few files and leaving the rest to you, it does it all — it really is like an AI full stack developer.

But there’s a caveat here. This doesn’t mean that Bolt is the world’s best full stack developer, it’s still relatively new and uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet under-the-hood, which is an awesome model for coding but also has its fair share of weird bugs and funky issues.

I’ll give you an example. I decided to start recording some You Tube videos of me playing around with Bolt, the first one I’m doing is about building a dashboard for tracking NFT prices.

If you watch the video you’ll see Bolt get stuck trying to load an image for one of the projects. And by stuck I mean really stuck. The same goes for working with APIs. Bolt will be able to scaffold everything you need, dozens of files, a package.json, even pull in API creds from a .env file, but when it comes to reading the JSON output of the API itself, it can get pretty darn confused.

I recorded a video this morning going through the API setup I did to pull NFT floor prices and walked through the debug process when Bolt wasn’t able to pull the floor price directly. While I tried to solve all through prompting, in the end, I did need to leverage my Javascript knoweldge, jump into a specific file, look at a function, and see exactly how the code was written to parse the JSON output of the API.

This is not something I think you’d need to be an expert developer to do (and trust me, I’m far from an expert), but you would likely need a coding background.

At the same time, Bolt makes building a dashboard like this significantly faster and more efficient than using Cursor since I would need to do a lot of the core setup myself and then leverage Cursor to write each individual file.

Still, I’m using Bolt daily now because I’ve found that leveraging it, in conjuction with Cursor is incredibly powerful. You can very quickly prototype an idea you have, get a fully functional app, host it, connect it to a database through something like Supabase, and then pull individual files into Cursor as you go from scaffolded prototype to fully functional app.

Of course, this goes back to what I was saying above about Cursor. For me as a developer, I still use Cursor to write my code, but I now use Bolt to build all my prototypes.

For non-developers, this is where things get interesting. As I tried to introduce Cursor to non-developers I saw many of them struggle. For very simple one page apps, Cursor could do the trick, but connecting to a database, adding authentication, hosting, etc. that’s where Cursor just wasn’t enough.

But with Bolt, everything changes.

Now after playing around with Bolt for long enough I can tell you, it’s a game-changer, and it will very likely lower the barrier to entry for millions of people around the world who want to build software, and that is a beautiful thing.

At the same time, for software engineers, it will allow for much faster and more streamlined rapid prototyping and in many cases help us all write better code.

Here’s a good example. I don’t have a ton of experience with Next.js. Sure, I could watch a bunch of You Tube videos, read some books, take a 30 hour course on it. Or, since I’ve always found I learn more by doing, I can tell Bolt to build a Next.js app, using the latest version of Next.js and leveraging the best current design patterns and learn as I build.

I believe Bolt is going to create an entirely new learning path for both new and existing software engineers to learn by doing in a much faster, more streamlined, and let’s face it, more fun way.

Okay, I’m going to stop here for now because I think I’ve covered all the main points I wanted to touch on here. I’m so excited about Bolt I have also started a blog where I’ll be sharing my videos along with sample prompts, tips, tricks, etc. You can check it out at BuildingWithBolt.com.

If you liked this post and want me to write more about Bolt here on Medium, I’m happy to do that too, just give this post some claps so I know I should keep going.