StackBlitz CEO Eric Simons discusses developer adoption and real-world use cases for the AI-assisted development tool Bolt.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: AI reduces a month of engineering time to five minutes
“What would take a month of engineering time Can take literally five minutes.”
Assertion Partly supported
Simons: Bolt Hackathon broke world records with 130,000 participants and 1M apps
“The world record for the largest hackathon prior to this hackathon was 66,000 people. On day one, we crossed that number. At the end, we had over a 130,000 people, and over a million new web apps were created in, in that 30 day period.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Simons: AI will augment workers rather than replace them
“Most people think AI is going to replace them, but in, in reality, it's just gonna augment them and supercharge them.”
Opinion
Simons: Software engineers lag behind entrepreneurs in adopting AI tools
“I think a lot of software engineers have been kind of late to the game on trying to adopt AI tools. And also the way that they're kind of approaching is very different than someone who is you know, kind of entrepreneurial in nature.”
Insight
Simons: Build LLM features incrementally with minimal initial prompts rather than bulk
“Especially, especially when you're dealing with stuff that's going to be like more complicated functionality. Like for design changes, I'll often just, I'll just kind of like, I'll be like looking at the designers creating a list in, in one shop message. I'm l…”
Insight
Simons: Conversational voice AI eliminates the friction of diet tracking apps
“This is a good example of just an app that a lot of people need and I think it would be really hard to do on your own. Like, I've done this, so if you try and, you know, track your dieting, whatever have you, I think the inclusion of AI, whether we can just ta…”