bolt.new from StackBlitz: how they surfed the AI wave—with no wipeouts

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That’s our side, but let’s turn to StackBlitz CEO Eric Simons’ for his take on their success!

The origins of StackBlitz

Founded back in 2018 by Eric Simons and Albert Pai, StackBlitz aimed to revolutionize web development by moving it entirely into the browser. At present, it’s an online collaborative IDE that allows server-side software like Node.js to be run entirely in the web browser, enabling fully online full-stack development.

Their vision attracted heavyweight investors including Greylock, Google Ventures, and GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, culminating in a $7.9M seed round in April 2022. This funding helped them pioneer WebContainers, a WebAssembly-based operating system, running within the browser’s sandbox.

StackBlitz, meet the Evil Martians

Evil Martians met the StackBlitz team in 2021. Since then, we’ve been a key technical partner in scaling their platform.

We enhanced their core technology and infrastructure, which now serves over 3 million developers per month. As a taste of what we’ve been up to, our engineering teams contributed to all of the following:

• Ruby on Rails backend development
• Enterprise features, including fine-grained access controls and on-premise deployments
• Performance and scalability optimizations

Together, we helped create a robust IDE that enables a level of complete isolation necessary for running potentially dangerous code thanks to WebContainers.

This context is important to digest, because all of these foundational aspects in terms of browser-based development would later prove crucial for bolt.new’s success.

And then, everything changed

With the emergence of AI coding assistants, many focused on generating code snippets in order to copy them into local environments.

But StackBlitz saw a different opportunity!

From May-June of 2024, they found something that changed everything: Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Unlike previous models that required complex retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and additional infrastructure, Claude excelled at zero-shot code generation, understanding and executing complex development tasks without extensive prompt engineering or additional tooling.

There’s an order of magnitude difference in the LLM’s required infrastructure to make it functional versus zero shot. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the enabling technology that made this product possible, period.

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Now, with their WebContainers already providing instant, secure development environments, the stage was set to create something truly unprecedented, using bolt.new right in the browser:

bolt.new: what do you want to build?

The StackBlitz team combined their WebContainers technology with Claude 3.5’s capabilities to create something incredibly impressive. As reported by Anthropic themselves!

bolt.new doesn’t just generate code-it runs it! It’s like the difference between trying a recipe for yourself versus having a pro chef cooking it for you, making fine adjustments, and performing test tastes until everything is just right.

Further, because the code is being instantly executed in WebContainers, bolt.new can verify its own output and fix issues-before you even notice them!

So, no more messiness copying, pasting, and debugging AI-generated code: bolt.new delivers working software in real time.

And here’s a rundown of exactly what makes bolt.new so fresh:

• Code executes instantly in secure WebContainer sandboxes
• AI-managed package installation and configuration
• Complex environments that spin up in milliseconds
• A streaming interface that shows real-time results
• One-click production deploy to Netlify

The approach prioritizes speed and user experience-no waiting for cloud VMs to spin up or dealing with latency issues.

As Eric Simons excitedly shared in his keynote at ViteConf 2024 while announcing bolt.new: “We’ve got an amazing experience that is like nothing you’ve ever seen.” (The conversation about bolt.new begins around 6:50).

The market response to bolt.new was unprecedented:

• Zero to $4M in annual recurring revenue in just 4 weeks (continues to grow exponentially)
• Tens of thousands of new customers, with usage doubling daily
• 99% reduction in development costs for users
• From idea to production deployment in one click

The clouds of doubt have long since dispersed. This is real.

As StackBlitz’s technology partner, we’ve witnessed firsthand how bolt.new is transforming workflows.

But frankly speaking, even our most skeptical Martians, those who had, just a year ago, dismissed previous code generation tools as ineffective …are now active bolt.new users!

The reason for that is quite simple: the magic of WebContainers. This means generated code executing instantly in your browser. No waiting for cloud environments, no complex setups-just immediate results.

Then, when combined with Claude’s reliable code generation, this had created an paradigm-shifting development experience: keystrokes that instantly turn into working, production-ready code running right in front of you.

We’re going way beyond simple productivity gains here. This is fundamentally changing how developers iterate and build.

That said, this isn’t just about generating code-it’s about building complete, production-ready applications.

By integrating with managed databases, like Supabase, developers can create full-stack applications directly from natural language prompts. The tooling handles everything from database schema creation to API integration, all while maintaining the instant execution that makes bolt.new unique. And this synergy has not gone unnoticed.

More here too, direct from Supabase:

Unlike many AI coding tools that produce static output, bolt.new follows a crucial design principle: AI-generated code should be malleable. Every project bolt.new creates is immediately ready for editing right in the browser. This means developers can use AI-generated code as a starting point, then customize and extend it to match their exact requirements - all without leaving the development environment.

Here’s a perspective from Arthur Objartel, a Martian designer currently working on a client project, a unicorn AI-driven startup:

I’ve been using bolt.new for the past week and it’s simply mind-blowing. With bolt.new, designers who couldn’t code before can now create functional prototypes and test hypotheses much faster and cheaper. It works equally well for high-level concepts and small components that you want to ‘feel in action’.

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But beyond our own testimonials, the impact is already readily visible within the vibrant bolt.new community. Developers are actively sharing their creations on social platforms-from complex enterprise applications to personal projects:

And below, here’s a great demo by @swyx creating a game using voice commands + agents using http://bolt.new @OpenAI Dev Day in Singapore! 🤯

There is even a rapidly growing subreddit: r/boltnewbuilders!

Perhaps most noteworthy of all, this democratization of web development represents a fundamental shift in who can build for the web. Or, as Eric Simons says:

Software doesn’t have to be built only by traditional developers and teams. It can now be prompted into existence by the end users themselves, for themselves.

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Startups on Rails

Now, as Evil Martians, here’s something we absolutely have to talk about. While WebAssembly is the core technology behind StackBlitz, and the product currently targets Node.js applications and frontend frameworks, both StackBlitz and bolt leverage the power of Ruby on Rails.

More specificially, Ruby powers the core backend of the web applications: users, permissions, billing, and other core business logic beyond the WebAssembly magic is written in Ruby and benefits from the reliability and scalability of Rails.

(Notably, Figma, which was among the early investors in StackBlitz, also leverages Ruby, TypeScript and WebAssembly in a similar fashion.)

What makes StackBlitz’s journey particularly inspiring is how it mirrors other successful Rails startups, as highlighted in Irina Nazarova’s, CEO at Evil Martians, RailsConf keynote: recognizing that a robust, proven technology stack lets you focus on innovation rather than reinventing infrastructure.

Rails keeps the backend team (which includes a Martian) at StackBlitz efficient while also helping ensure security and maintainability of the platform.

A recent example demonstrates this perfectly: when users started running out of tokens and demanded the opportunity to buy more, the team was able to quickly implement new billing options thanks to Rails’ flexibility and reliability.

A lesson for the AI era: build on your strengths!

StackBlitz’s success demonstrates how deep technical and product expertise can be a competitive advantage in the AI era. Don’t go on a wild AI goose chase! Instead, think about how to leverage it to save 80-90% of your customers’ time with AI-powered features and tools.

In that spirit, here’s the lessons that bolt.new excellently executed from our Successful Developer Product Playbook:

• Build for the existing audience that you’re already connected with. For StackBlitz, these are engineers and entrepreneurs.
• Think about how AI can solve your customer problems in dramatically new ways.
• Leverage the competitive advantages and superpowers of the existing product
• Keep the result of the AI generation editable at the customers’ fingertips

For founders watching the AI revolution unfold, perhaps with a more conservative mindset, this message is clear: your existing technology isn’t a limitation-it’s your launchpad into the future.

Let’s think about the problems that your existing customers already have, think outside the box, and really contemplate how AI can change that in completely new ways.

And, of course, at Evil Martians, we’re here to help brainstorm and make your vision a reality!