minimal-bolts
Implementing a minimal bolts.new for education purposes using less than 60 lines of shell along with a system prompt in Markdown.
How to Use
Update the API KEY and other information in the .env file.
You can also configure LLM providers other than OpenAI's gpt-4o.
Gains and Losses
bolts.new is an incredibly fascinating and elegantly designed project, so it’s clear that I can’t replicate all its features with just a few dozen lines of shell.
The purpose of this project is to adhere to the philosophy proposed by Anthropic: learning about LLMs should start with the most fundamental API requests.
To achieve this, I examined the open-source code of bolts.new, found its system prompt, and understood how it drives an LLM to return the necessary materials (files and shell commands) for starting a code workspace. Then, I used a shell script to execute these materials.
However, we inevitably lost certain features:
- The browser-based development experience powered by WebContainer: While this is a loss, it also opens the door to using any tools available on the OS.
- The ability to further customize and modify
- A fully-featured chat UI
- …
Roadmap
This project has no further steps planned. However, you can reference its code and tweak the system prompt to suit your needs. Beyond this project, I am working on a more ambitious and exciting AI coder project. If you’re interested, feel free to follow my X account for updates.