Insight
Simons: System prompts are not a moat, like viewing source on Google
“It's not going to be, you know, the system prompt kind of a, you know, for those who have done web development, it's kind of like view sourcing on a webpage. Like you can go to google.com, you can view source. No one so far has kind of done that and built anot…”
Opinion
Simons: Claude 3.5 Sonnet crossed tipping point to write production applications
“And just from a technical perspective, AI code gen models there's a tipping point specifically with Sonnet three, five, there's a chasm that's been crossed here as far as AI models are,
Have gone over the tipping point of being good enough to really write real…”
Opinion
Simons: Code Generation Is Not Hitting AI Scaling Limits
“I think folks have been kind of concerned about are we hitting kind of limits of this stuff, et cetera, and no, I don't think so. Like, in the specific realm of CodeGen, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot of improvements pretty rapidl…”
Disclosure
Simons: Most Bolt users are non-technical, led by former dev managers
“That's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are, you know, non-technical. And it's interesting, the most successful people that are using Bolt are actually people that have had to interact with or manage development teams.”
Insight
Simons: Managing AI models is extremely similar to managing human developers
“Because it turns out kind of managing an AI is extremely similar to managing actual software developers.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Startups are launching and making money on Stripe using Bolt.new
“We've been online for just under two months now, and we've already had the first startups launch out of this thing. You know, they've used Bolt to build their startup and are making money, like, you know, charging on Stripe or whatever have you.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Bolt.new reduced a $5k, 3-month app project to $50 and 2 weeks
“A week before we launched Bolt she went onto Upwork and listed this project and said, Hey, I want to build this product. Da da da. Asked for quotes on the thing. She got a quote for 5000 dollars from, I think it was Dev in like Ukraine or something estimated t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Web dev shops use AI to build faster while charging standard rates
“A lot of folks you know, especially in the web dev shops, et cetera, They're just, they're able to punch out incredible web applications faster than ever before for clients and are able to charge the same price.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Bolt Reached Nearly 200,000 Weekly Users Building Web Applications
“Last week, we had, you know, almost 200,000 software composers, you know, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Simons: AI Software Composers Could Eventually Reach 100 Million
“We think that, that number should be a hundred million. And yeah, and we, we're on this growth clip it seems like you know, maybe, maybe we'll get there sooner or later.”
Insight
Simons: In-browser dev environments eliminate server latency and cloud compute costs
“It's very complicated and expensive to typically do this if you're going to use servers. So it's very valuable to like do it in the browser because it's extremely fast. There's no latency. You're not paying by the minute, you know, for some cloud.”
Insight
Simons: Simple AI wrappers quickly die when foundation labs update products
“Whenever the next model comes or whenever, you know, one of the AI labs eventually integrates that into their chat products or whatever those companies, you know, kind of tend to go away pretty quickly.”
Disclosure
Simons: StackBlitz shelved Bolt in February until Claude 3.5 preview arrived
“Earlier this year, I think like in February, we had the idea for Bolt.
We tried to build it with some of the, you know, frontier models available at that time.
Wasn't possible to do.
the models were just did not spit back quality, accurate code that was const…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Large number of Cursor downloads come from non-developers
“There is, and there was, and is a large number of people
They've been downloading cursor that are not developers because it let them meaningfully dip their toes into kind of like clicking accept change from the AI.”
Insight
Simons: Successful computing platforms must natively support building their own software
“If you look at every other platform that's ever existed, that's been an important capability of every platform that's ever
Succeeded in a meaningful way.
You know, Windows can build Windows apps.
Macs can build Mac apps.
The web does not have a built-in wa…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Simons: Engineers will increasingly operate as high-level software composers with AI agents
“I think engineers are going to more and more just be instructing these things at a higher level than just, Hey, tab, complete this thing. It's like, Hey, go and do X, Y, Z and send it off.”
Assertion Supported
Simons: StackBlitz spent five years building its WebContainer technology
“One of the big advantages we have is we've been building this web container technology for five years, and it's like pretty, pretty difficult stuff to do.”
Assertion Supported
Simons: Figma's original pitch was a WebGL 3D demo, not a design tool
“When they, their first pitch for Figma,
Was not like a design tool.
They didn't have a design tool.
They had a demo, like a WebGL demo of a three D ball dropping.
And the pitch was what browsers have gotten powerful enough to do meaningful three D graphics…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: StackBlitz has 3 million monthly active developers
“I think we're doing like three million developers a month using StackBlitz today.”
