Simons: System prompts are not a moat, like viewing source on Google
Eric Simons · No Priors Ep. 92 | With StackBlitz CEO and Co-Founder Eric Simons · Dec 6, 2024 · at 5:52
StackBlitz CEO Eric Simons explains why open-sourcing Bolt.new's system prompts does not undermine the company's defensibility.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 another trillion dollar company that took out Google by doing that, right? You can learn a lot, but it's not actually, you know, kind of building this cohesive end-to-end product business experience is, is a totally different thing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Eric Simons
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”