bolt.new, But Local

StackBlitz open-sourced bolt.new this week and I finally got around to trying it — a full-stack AI development environment that runs in the browser, writes code, installs packages, spins up a dev server, and deploys, all in one shot, no context-switching required.

The cloud version uses their API. The local version runs on qwen2.5-coder, which means you can have a complete AI-driven full-stack IDE running on your own hardware, burning your own electricity, leaking data to no one.

It works as promised. That's the whole note. It works.

There is something quietly destabilizing about watching a local model scaffold a working Next.js app in a browser tab — not because it's magic, it's not, the pieces have all been around — but because the assembly is finally smooth enough that you forget to be skeptical. You type a thing, a thing appears, the thing runs. The gap between intention and artifact is just gone, and the absence of that gap is so unfamiliar it reads as a trick.

It isn't a trick. It's just fast now.

The repo is at stackblitz/bolt.new if you want to run it yourself, which I recommend, mostly so you can sit with the unsettling feeling of watching your laptop write software for you while you get a glass of water.