Vincent RodriguezDesigner

Context

After months of collaboration, StackBlitz asked me to pair with a developer on an R&D question: what happens if you put AI models inside StackBlitz, their in-browser IDE?

There were two of us, and we were the entire product team for the first weeks. Regular check-ins with Eric Simons, otherwise full autonomy. I owned design and art direction, including the logo and the product's visual identity.

Challenge

Everything had to be built from scratch. At the time, LLMs only generated single code files or snippets, never entire web projects. The only product somewhat in that space was Vercel's v0, and it was still a fairly basic UI component generator. There was no interface to start from.

Very quickly, though, the ambition became enormous. Paired with WebContainers, StackBlitz's technology for running development servers right in the browser, the models could do far more than write code: they could build and run an entire web project in a single tab.

Approach

At first, the project was meant to be a StackBlitz extension for developers, a bit like Cursor and Windsurf, which were just starting to emerge. That premise fell apart from the first demos. The AI was already powerful enough that people who couldn't code could create what they wanted, simply and online. The "developers" framing was leaving most of the product's value on the table.

That audience shift mid-course is what shaped the product. It needed an interface accessible to the widest audience, without the technical machinery disappearing. Advanced users still had to be able to go as far as on a code editor, the way products like Framer allow.

Watching AI develop from the inside was a wild experience. So much so that I decided to work on Bolt.new exclusively for almost all of 2025, watching the team grow from 2 to nearly 80 people.

Outcome

Bolt shipped three months after the R&D started. StackBlitz went from $50k to $20M ARR in the two months that followed, then raised $100M in Series B. The product continues to thrive today, with nearly 7 million users and, in its busiest periods, close to 100,000 new ones a week.