The Exchanges

Q Is it me or is this way more simple than cursor if you're not a developer?

A Oh yeah. I mean, a hundred percent. Right. And like when we, we originally like, you know, we're put bolt online. Like we, you know, Cause you gotta understand, like, from our point of view at StackBlitz, we, we, we, we've been in the business of making web IDEs. Like, you know, it's kind of like, this is, this, what I'm showing you here, this is, this is our, has been our product for seven years. Like, this is what we do. Um, you know, you can open up repos and like, and when you open these things up, uh, it's an, it's an IDE, right? Like it's not, there's no AI, there's no, you know, so people, we, we, we had some people building micro SaaS with this, but I mean, it was, you know, it was like, A couple percent of our user base, if that, right? Um, so when we put Bolt online, we, we thought developers were going to be, you know, we thought the developers were going to You know, Dega, cause it, you know, allows them to punch out code faster and stuff. Um, and we, but, and we certainly didn't think that this would, we would get compared to cursor. Um, but, you know, kind of from when we launched, what we ended up finding is a lot of, a lot of folks have been, you know, adopting cursor that are, you know, again, not like, you know, uh, uh, like engineers per se, like you have by, by their, their day job or whatever. Um, and, and bold is amazing for this, right? Because yeah, like…

AI assessment note: “Oh yeah. I mean, a hundred percent. Right.”

Q Why did you say I just want people to chat with one another versus I want a Discord-like experience or, you know, what was the thinking behind, behind that?

A Yeah. Fair enough. There, there wasn't a ton. And I, I think the main thing I was thinking is let's like start with something simple because if it, if it doesn't work, then, um, uh, at least there's not a ton of functionality for things that they have to like sift through. Um, and, um, That was, that was pretty much the only reason, but, uh, one of our, one of our folks actually did do, like, I think at the launch video, we actually had like a discord app for musicians was like the prompt, um, actually worked. Uh, so you can add, you know, you can, you can have it be something more sophisticated. Once this thing's built too, we can, we can go and say, add like presence when people are online or whatever, you know, and stuff like that. Um, so let's see punch out. It looks like, uh, yeah, this is, this is coming through kind of slow. I think our AI provider is, uh, Uh, that is anthropic, and, uh, you know, ever since, ever since, say now, out of A.W.A. saw this, but then, they, uh, you know, Copilot is allowing Sonnet usage now. Kind of noticed a little bit of slowdown.

AI assessment note: “main thing I was thinking is let's like start with something simple”

Q I also noticed, I also noticed in the code that it seems like the, one of the images is an Unsplash image, which I think is royalty free. Can you talk more about that?

A Yeah. Yeah. So we've trained this thing to actually, uh, you know, just out of the box, it'll, it'll go and pull stuff from Unsplash. I think a couple other providers as well. Um, which is great. Cause it's like, you don't have to pay any money for it. Um, you know, out of the box, you get like, you know, something that, that looks pretty good. Right. Um, there you go. So we've got this, uh, this directory here. I'm gonna go ahead and, uh, make this thing a little, little wider screen. Um, there we go. Essential tools for indie hackers. Um, And like I said, this, and this is kind of like, again, we, because we explained kind of the essence of, Hey, who's the audience and, and, you know, what are they trying to do with this versus just, Hey, here's a directory of products. We would have gotten something kind of, you would have, you know, if you kind of squinted, it's like, okay, yeah, there's a list of products, but now the marketing of these things are actually like the actual copy, um, makes more sense. Right. And, um, so I can click in and this is the, the page, you know, for, for this product. Right. Um, so Pretty cool. So we've got our own, our own directory site. Um, and

AI assessment note: “we've trained this thing to actually, uh, you know, just out of the box, it'll, it'll go and pull stuff from Unsplash”

Q Is that, yeah, I'm, I'm, it's interesting. Cause like, I'm, I'm curious, like why is, is there, is there too long of a prompt? Cause when I'm prompting, I'm doing like one or two lines and I'm seeing you kind of write more of a paragraph or two paragraphs.

A We'll see. I mean, we'll see how it works. It kind of depends, right? And so it's, you know, sometimes and, and what, what, you know, we'll see how this prompt works, but sometimes I'll put a prompt in and it gives me something back. I'm like, this is like kind of so far off that I'm actually just going to go back to the bowl home and just start to set a brand new prompt off, right? Usually when I'm in the chat, you can like roll back. And so, you know, I'll, I'll use that often, but especially with this, when you're, especially when you're kind of describing this first paragraph is like high level, this is the target audience. This is the, you know, the high level, what this product is. And this is actually just kind of more like specifically, here's the thing you, here's the functionality we want in it. Right. Um, it tends to be pretty good because what it's actually going to go and do is, uh, well, we'll see if it, you know, if it lives up to what, what, you know, I'm about to say, but by, by, because we kind of gave it this sort of, um, you know, high level, almost like marketing instructions when it's actually punching out the name of this directory or like, The descriptions, it should do a pretty good job of like kind of conveying like, Hey, like actually, actually write a good marketing copy. Right. Um, you know, which is if you're, if you're making a product like this, …

AI assessment note: “It kind of depends... when you're kind of describing this first paragraph is like high level”

Q And then from a, and then from a design perspective, do you recommend us, like, giving feedback at this prompt level, or should we wait until, until we see what comes back?

A Sometimes it's, it's like, sometimes good to kind of break it into distinct blocks where it's like, it's like, okay, let's kind of do these things. And then, and then you can circle back and be like, okay, now like how to do this, some of the designs, it kind of gives you the other reason too, is like, you'll see here, there's this undo button. So if we didn't like what just happened there, obviously it did fix the error, so I don't want to reverse it, but we didn't like it. I can click undo and it'll actually roll back to the last, uh, checkpoint. Right. So we don't like what happens here. We can either tell the, like reprompt the AI, or we can just say, okay, throw out everything you just did. Let's just get back to the working state and then kind of start from there. Um, but if you, if, if you tell the AI to do like a ton of different things and it does a lot of them right, but then one of them wrong, then you don't want to roll back, but, but you, you, you know, that's the only, you're gonna have to manually change the code yourself. So that's the benefit of kind of breaking it up into smaller tasks. So, um, we're gonna just send this one. Um, And, uh, it's going to go ahead and add that in. I don't know why it keeps editing this, this types file. I don't want types. I just want to ship. Um, yeah, so that's, um, yeah, usually, usually like having some very small focus proce…

AI assessment note: “good to kind of break it into distinct blocks where it's like, okay”