Latest news with #Bolt.new
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
I vibe coded a website with my daughter using AI. We're complete novices. Here's what happened.
I write a newsletter for Business Insider called Tech Memo. There's a section called AI Playground where I use a new generative AI tool every week. My latest experiment took me and my daughter deep into the world of AI coding tools. We got started on a Sunday on the couch in early June. My daughter Tessa was back home from Wake Forest for part of the summer. She has a soap business called Scrub Club and wanted a website to promote and sell her products. So we logged into and signed up for the company's Hackathon challenge. This gave us 10 million tokens to use for free. Normally, a subscription like this would cost $20 a month. Bolt is designed for novices, like us, who have no software coding experience. It's part of a new breed of AI tools that have spawned the term " vibe coding." Here's how our vibe sessions went. Spoiler alert: The Scrub Club website is up and running. Let us know what you think: Getting started We started by uploading some photos of Tessa's soaps, along with a rough description of the website she wanted. Bolt created the site within a couple of minutes, added the soap photos to the correct sections of the site, and updated us: "Your collection now showcases an amazing variety of unique shapes, colors, and scents — from elegant leaf-impressed bars with beautiful gradient effects to whimsical unicorns and vibrant autumn maple leaves. Each product maintains the handcrafted artisan quality that makes Scrub Club special!" This was an endearing feature of Bolt. No matter how crap our ideas or requests were, the tool retained a positive and supportive attitude. Sometimes, it was overly eager, in fact. Mistakes and stuff that wasn't true When we edited some of the product listings, it took the header image of the Scrub Club logo and incorrectly put it as a new product listing. We had to type in another request to remove that. And as the afternoon progressed, the more we tweaked and fiddled, the more odd updates and mistakes the tool made. The Bolt tool added some things that were not entirely true, to put it mildly: It listed bestsellers that were not the top-selling products It added customer reviews, saying things like "14 ***** Reviews" when there have been very few reviews online for Tessa's soaps so far. It also kept insisting on saying Scrub Club had "+100 Happy Customers." The real number (so far!) is just over 20. Bolt was particularly over-eager when it came to describing the soaps Tessa made and listed on the Scrub Club site. For one of her blue soap bars, it mentioned "ocean breeze scent." Tessa has not managed to bottle the smell of the sea yet for her products. Bolt also highlighted "lavender and vanilla fragrance," "candy and berry scent," and decided that a yellow moth-shaped soap smelled of "spice." None of this is true, although my daughter's soaps do smell nice! There's been some early research on trying to get machines to understand different smells, but that's clearly not embedded in the AI models supporting Bolt's coding tool yet. Getting prescriptive So, we asked Bolt to "Keep everything else the same, but remove references to scents and smells from the product listings." We had to be prescriptive like this because when we asked for other changes earlier, Bolt would make the tweaks but would also change other things and get them wrong, which was frustrating. This time, though, Bolt removed all mentions of scent and smell without messing up other things on the site. "The product descriptions now focus on the visual aspects like colors, shapes, and designs instead of any olfactory elements. Everything else remains exactly the same, including pricing, layout, and functionality," Bolt told us in its chirpy tone. By the evening on Sunday, we had a website with many of Tessa's soaps listed. It had Tessa's Scrub Club logo, pricing details, a contact form, and links to Tessa's Etsy store and her Scrub Club Instagram account. We wanted to add the ability to accept payments. Things got a little complicated at this point. So we put the project on pause and fired up Netflix with some pizza for the rest of the evening. By then, we had 9.4 million tokens left in our Bolt account. Integrating Stripe payments About a week later, we logged back onto and tried to add Stripe to Tessa's Scrub Club website. Stripe is the main way developers add the ability to accept card and online payments for their sites and apps. We clicked on an "Integrations" button on the top right of the Bolt page and Stripe appeared in a dropdown menu along with Supabase and GitHub. We chose Stripe and Bolt told us this: "To implement payments in your application, we'll need to use Stripe, which is the industry standard for secure payment processing. Before we can proceed with the integration, you'll need to: Create a Stripe account if you haven't already Once logged in, navigate to the Developers section in your Stripe Dashboard Get your Stripe secret key Once you have your Stripe secret key, let me know and I'll help you implement a secure payment system in your application." We were sent over to Stripe's website and created an account there, and tracked down our secret API key pretty easily on the developer page. We copied this long string of characters, then we went back to Bolt and pasted the key into the right place. Then we went back to Stripe and looked for what to do next. Things got pretty confusing at this point (well, for us anyway!). We ended up on a page that required us to create new products and set pricing, shipping, sales tax rates, and other complex stuff. Just asking Bolt to do it So, we gave up and just went back to Bolt and typed in "We added our secret API key from Stripe. What do we do now?" Bolt replied reassuringly: " Perfect! Now that you have your Stripe secret key set up, I'll integrate Stripe payments into your Scrub Club website. I'll add a complete payment system with a shopping cart, checkout process, and order confirmation." Then it did all the coding work and added the following features: A Shopping Cart System A Checkout Process Customer Information Form: Collects shipping details and contact info Order Summary: Shows all items and total before checkout Order Confirmation: Success page after order placement Key Features Quantity Management: Increase/decrease quantities in cart Remove Items: Delete items from cart Price Calculations: Automatic total calculations Email Integration, with customer orders sent directly to Tessa's email address. Bolt also described the ordering process clearly. When customers place an order: They fill out their information and review their cart The system sends an email to Tessa with all order details She can then contact them directly to arrange payment via Venmo, PayPal, etc. " This gives you full control over the payment process while providing a professional shopping experience," Bolt said. " The cart icon in the header shows the number of items, and customers can easily add products, review their cart, and place orders. The system is production-ready and will help streamline your order process!" we were also told. Deploying via Netlify We then clicked the blue "Deploy" button at the top right corner of the Bolt page. This connected us to Netlify, a company that hosts websites and apps created with Bolt. After about one minute, Bolt told us the site was deployed and gave us a URL link to check it out online. This all seemed too easy, so we double checked: "Does this website work fully now, or do we have to do anything else?" we typed the Bolt query box. It replied, saying the site was "fully functional!" and summarized everything we'd created, including a shopping cart, a checkout process, and a product catalog. It also shared a useful reminder about the payment process. The checkout page explains to customers that Tessa will contact them directly for payment, "which is perfect for a small business. No monthly fees or complex payment processing needed." Claiming our project and picking a domain One wrinkle at the end: Bolt said that to claim this project for ourselves, we had to go to Netlify's website and do a few more things. It provided a link for us to click. We followed that and were asked to create a Netlify account, which we did. Then we were taken straight to the page where we could claim the project. Note: If you don't do this, someone else might get hold of your claim link and grab your site for themselves and change it. Not good. Once the project belonged to us, we tried to buy a custom domain via Netlify. We chose which cost $15 for the first year. We were told to wait about 10 minutes, so we hung some laundry out to dry in the garden, then came back. By then, it was all done, including encryption certificates and other important stuff that we really didn't want to be bothered with. A review from my editor I sent the website to my editor Akin Oyedele and asked for feedback. Here's his review: What he liked: The photos were sharp and consistent. The soap shapes themselves were creative. The website overall looked clean and professionally done. My browser didn't warn that the site wasn't secure. Most of the links worked. What he didn't quite like: The logo was underwhelming compared to the visual quality of the photos When he tried to add more than one of each soap, he had to press the "add to cart" button multiple times. Usually, a counter with plus and minus signs pops up on that button on other websites. The heart buttons on some of the soaps didn't do anything He wished there were descriptions of how the soaps smell. At this point, I broke the news to Akin about Bolt's over-eager scent descriptions! A final tweak and thoughts In response to his feedback, we went back into Bolt and asked the tool to make the Scrub Club logo larger. It did that, but then cut off the top of the rest of the site. We got a little whiny at this point and sent this to Bolt: "You've cut off the top of the rest of the website now. Can you fix that please?" Bolt responded by saying, "You're absolutely right!" and went about addressing the problem. That took about two minutes, and then we asked it to deploy the site again to Netlify, which it did in about five minutes. At the end of all this, we had 8.9 million tokens left in the Bolt account. So we'd used 1.1 million. All in all, this was a relatively easy lift for two people with no software coding experience. When we were stumped by what to do next, we often just typed questions into Bolt without thinking too much about the prompts. This worked almost always. Sometimes, we had to repeat requests or get more specific and prescriptive, but that wasn't too much extra work. Total time spent on the project: About six hours. For two people with no coding background, the experience was surprisingly smooth — proof that AI tools like Bolt can empower anyone to build a real website.
Business Insider
13-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
A former Google veteran used vibe coding to test a cat-purring app. It was fun, but wasn't purrfect.
This is the space where I usually try an AI tool. This week, though, I'm featuring an experience shared by a Tech Memo reader who got in touch after last week's installment about AI coding services such as Replit, Cursor, and This person worked at Google for more than two decades, so they know their software! They recently tried out Replit, following Google CEO Sundar Pichai saying he's been messing around with this tool. "Like Sundar, I've also tried Replit to test out a cat purring app I had (lol). I poked around on some other options, but I liked Replit because it took the query and really built an app for you (even on the free test version). So based on a query alone and answering some questions (e.g., do you want people to be able to log in and save their cat?), you had an app. And it would work! You could launch it if you were really interested and happy with it. "The limitations came with fine-tuning the app from there, as it seemed to get confused (and use up your credits) if you asked it for changes, e.g., change how the cat looked. It also was a pretty rough product; ultimately, if you wanted more than a proof of concept, you'd probably want to delve into the software code and change things yourself versus relying on queries. "Over time, I think they'll fine-tune these things and I love how it makes it easy to prototype ideas. It really lowers the upfront cost of testing ideas." Thank you, dear reader, for getting in touch. I have also been messing around with an AI coding tool. I chose partly because I recently met the cofounder of the startup behind this service, Stackblitz's Eric Simons (another Tech Memo reader, btw). Next week, I'll share some thoughts about Bolt. I've been building something with my daughter Tessa and we can't wait to show you!
Business Insider
18-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Silicon Valley's hottest coding startup nearly died
In 2017, Eric Simons founded StackBlitz with his childhood friend Albert Pai. Six years later, it was the startup equivalent of the walking dead. StackBlitz raised funding to build software development tools, including WebContainers technology that let engineers create and manage projects in a browser, rather than on their laptops. The business didn't really take off, and by late 2023, things came to a head. StackBlitz wasn't generating much revenue. Growth was lackluster. At a board meeting that December, an ultimatum was issued: Show real progress, or you're toast. Simons and Pai pitched a plan to grow by ramping up sales efforts for existing products, while building new offerings that could be bigger. "We also acknowledged that it might be time to explore acquisition scenarios ahead of potential failure," Simons recalled. Then, one board member, Thomas Krane, got real: By the end of 2024, everyone needed finality on StackBlitz's fate. "I think I was saying what a lot of others were thinking in the room," Krane told Business Insider. "No one was happy with the trajectory," venture capitalist and StackBlitz board director Sarah Guo remembers. "We needed a new plan." When the meeting ended, Simons walked out of his "shed-turned-home office" into his backyard on a cloudy, windy Bay Area day to try to process the news. "It was a tough pill to swallow, but we agreed," he said. As 2024 began, it looked like StackBlitz was about to become one of the thousands of startups that fizzle into the abyss of venture capital history every year. Not so fast. In Silicon Valley, fortunes can turn on dime as new inventions spread like wildfire, incinerating legacy technology and feeding unlikely growth from the embers. And this is what happened to StackBlitz. Noodling with OpenAI models In early 2024, Simons, Pai, and their co-workers probably should have been meeting more with the investment bankers Krane had introduced them to — an attempt to ring what value remained from the struggling startup. Instead, like Silicon Valley founders often do, they were noodling with new technology, seeing how OpenAI models performed on coding tasks. "The code output from their models would break, and the web apps created were buggy and unreliable," Simons said. "We thought it would be years before this improved. So we dropped that side project after about two weeks." A Bolt from the blue Then, in June 2024, OpenAI rival Anthropic launched its Sonnet 3.5 AI model. This was a lot better at coding, and it became the technical foundation for an explosion in AI coding startups, such as Cursor and Lovable, and an important driver of what's now known as vibe coding. That summer, StackBlitz started working on a new product that relied on Anthropic's breakthrough to bring coding to non-technical users. On Oct. 3, StackBlitz launched this new service. It was called a play on the startup's lightning-bolt logo. It took roughly 10 employees three months to create. Bolt used StackBlitz's technological base — that WebContainers underpinning that allows engineers to work in a browser — and added a simple box on top with a flashing cursor and a question, "What do you want to build?" The service offered a tantalizingly simple proposition: Type what you want to create in plain English and Bolt's software would tap into Anthropic's Sonnet model in the background and write the code needed to create a website or a mobile app. And not just simple sites to share your wedding photos. Full applications that let users take valuable actions including logging in, subscribing, and buying things. Before this, digital products like these required professional software engineers and developers to build them using complex coding languages and tricky tools that were way beyond the capabilities of non-technical people. Simons emailed StackBlitz investors to tell them about Bolt, and asked for their help. "If you can RT/share on X, and/or share with 3 developers you know, myself and the team would be extremely appreciative!" he wrote, according to a copy of that email obtained by BI. Crying in a "shed office" The first week that came out, it generated about $1 million of annual recurring revenue, or ARR, a common way cloud software services from startups are measured financially. The next week, it added another $1 million in ARR, and then another, according to Simons. StackBlitz wasn't, in fact, going to shut down. Instead, it had a hit on its hands. "I had slept three hours a night for a week straight to get the release out with our team," Simons told BI. "After seeing it live, and people loving it — beyond anything I had ever created before — I cried, alone at my desk in my backyard shed office." A very different investor update On the first day of November, Simons wrote a very different email to his investors. The subject line read, StackBlitz October Update: $0 to $4m ARR in 30 days. The number of active Bolt customers surged from about 600 to more than 14,000 in the first few weeks, according to a copy of the email obtained by BI. ARR soared from roughly $80,000 to more than $4 million in the same period. "You can imagine after years of grinding on our amazing core technology, endlessly searching for a valuable business use case of it, just striking out over and over again, how I and the team feel looking at this graph," Simons wrote. "If you had to put it into a word or two, it'd be something like 'HELL. YES.'" When talented technologists are pushed to search harder for new ways to monetize their inventions, on a tight deadline, sometimes magic happens, according to Krane from Insight Partners. "That life-or-death pressure led to a series of rapid pivots that ultimately led to this incredible outcome," he told BI. "This company broke every model in terms of growth rate." A new pricing model There was so much customer demand for Bolt that StackBlitz raised prices after about a week. The main subscription plan went from $9 a month to $20 a month. The startup also added new pricing tiers that cost $50, $100, and $200 a month. A few weeks after this change, almost half of Bolt's paying users were on more expensive plans. Simons said StackBlitz may have stumbled upon a new pricing model for AI code-generation services. (Turns out, he did). Every time a Bolt user typed in a request, this was transformed into " tokens," which AI models use to break letters, numbers, and other characters into digestible chunks. Each token costs a certain amount to process. Bolt users were sending in so many requests they were blowing through their token limits. So StackBlitz introduced tiered pricing so customers could pay extra to get more tokens. "Customers are willing to pay a lot of money for heavier usage of AI inference," Simons told his investors. One customer was quoted $5,000 and a 2-3 month timeframe by a Ukrainian contractor to develop an app. Instead, she bought Bolt's $50 a month plan, and built the app herself in less than two weeks. "1/100th of the cost, and 5-10x faster timeline," Simons wrote. A carrot or a stick? Simons also couldn't resist an invitation to stay on the rocket ship, dropping a classic Silicon Valley funding-raise carrot. Or was it stick? "We've also received substantial inbound interest from VCs and from strategic acquirers," the CEO wrote in the Nov. 1 email to investors. "So we're starting to explore how best to play our hand(s) in the coming weeks/months here." (Earlier this year, reports emerged of a new funding round valuing StackBlitz at roughly $700 million). With StackBlitz's demise averted, Simons realigned resources to focus on Bolt. The startup hired more staff and added Supabase, a database service that stores transaction data, user registrations, and other crucial information. It also added Stripe technology so Bolt users can easily accept card and digital payments. StackBlitz also spent heavily to educate customers on how to use Bolt better, running weekly live YouTube video sessions. Waiting for Anthropic Bolt was off the races. But there was still one big hurdle involving Anthropic. Back in the spring of 2024, an Anthropic cofounder filled out a "Contact Us" form on StackBlitz's site. The form asked anyone who wanted to license the WebContainers technology to fill out some basic details. "After we saw that form, we called to chat. He said Anthropic was working on a project and this could help," Simons recalled, without identifying the cofounder. For the first year, StackBlitz proposed a license for Anthropic with uncapped usage for about $300,000. "With hindsight, we made them a smokin' deal," Simons said. "We were desperate at that point." Other big customers might follow Anthropic's lead and sign license deals, too, the thinking went. By October, though, when Bolt had taken off using the same web-based StackBlitz technology, a $300,000 uncapped license suddenly looked like a very bad deal for Simons's startup. But there was a catch: Anthropic had to sign the contract by the end of October, otherwise the deal would expire. Simons and his StackBlitz co-workers watched the clock like hawks. "We were like, god, please don't sign it," Simons told BI. The deadline finally passed. Anthropic never signed. Simons doesn't know exactly why the AI lab didn't put pen to paper. However, he noted that Anthropic has "a lot of things going on." "They were like, 'we might come back to this in the future maybe,'" Simons said. "We have a great relationship with Anthropic. They are doing an incredible amount of revenue now, and so are we." Whatever the reason, StackBlitz was now free to pursue its Bolt growth strategy. A podcast appearance By December 6, Simons appeared on No Priors, a popular AI podcast hosted by Guo and another top AI startup investor, Elad Gil. (Guo is an early backer of StackBlitz). The CEO shared that Bolt was generating $20 million in ARR, just a few months after it launched. By the middle of March 2025, Bolt's ARR had jumped to $40 million. In a recent interview with BI, Simons wouldn't share more revenue details. However, he said StackBlitz planned to announce a new ARR number when Bolt passes triple-digit ARR, meaning more than $100 million. The service has 5 million registered users now, and Simons said StackBlitz is profitable, growing, and healthy. There's even a new name for the millions of non-technical users who craft digital offerings through Bolt. Simons calls them "software composers." A hackathon meeting He explained this to me at a "hackathon" event StackBlitz held on May 7 in San Francisco. Hundreds of "composers," along with other customers, partners, and investors, partied late into the evening, with The Chainsmokers DJ-ing. (The duo are StackBlitz investors). Simons held court, schmoozed and chatted, with a wide grin and seemingly endless energy. Through the din, I asked him if he was concerned about rival AI coding services nipping at his heels. After all, it had been about seven months since Bolt launched — a lifetime in Silicon Valley AI circles. Simons seemed unperturbed. He said the years of hard work that StackBlitz spent developing its WebContainers technology gives Bolt an edge that most rivals don't have. This allows Bolt-based applications to be built and run applications using the chips on customers' devices, such as laptops. Other AI coding providers must tap a cloud service each time a user spins up a project, which can get very expensive and technical, according to Simons. "People assume we're a startup that just launched yesterday," he said. "But we're an overnight success, seven years in the making." A party duel with Figma The competition doesn't wait long to respond in Silicon Valley, though. A few San Francisco blocks away, on the same day as Bolt's hackathon party, graphic design giant Figma announced a competing product at its annual Config conference. Figma Make is a new tool that helps developers create web apps using conversational prompts, rather than specialized software code. Sound familiar? "We believe there are multiple huge companies to be built here, and that the market for engineering is bigger because of AI," Guo said. Simons noted that this new Figma service doesn't use the same WebContainers technology that supports Bolt. "We wrote an operating system from scratch that runs in your browser. It's completely different from what Figma has," he argued. Still, I could tell Figma had made an impact. "What are the odds that we were throwing a giant party on the same day as their launch across the road? I'll leave that to your writer's imagination," Simons told me, with a giggle.
Business Insider
16-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
An exclusive look inside the hottest legal AI startup
Hello, and welcome to your weekly dose of Big Tech news and insights. I'm your host Alistair Barr. My dog Maisie is having surgery soon, so keep her in your thoughts. I recently met a friend for coffee, and he shared some surprising news. After working in cloud computing for roughly 20 years, he's moving from Silicon Valley to the UK. Would you leave Silicon Valley right now? Where would you go? (Send me a note if you want to share.) If you're interested in living in other places, check out our stories on moving to India, Canada, and Spain. Agenda This week, we're talking about how generative AI is changing professional services, especially law firms and consulting. We'll also take a look at the Silicon Valley chatter right now, including Meta's turning point, Google's pickle, and Microsoft's new AI vision. And I'll experiment with an AI tool and show you the results — something I hope to do each week, and get your responses and recommendations. Central story unit I went to a party in San Francisco recently. Yeah, I know, crazy. Actually, it was a bit wild, in a lovable, techy way. StackBlitz threw a "hackathon" event to show off its AI coding service called It's a hot product right now, and the party was packed. The Chainsmokers DJ-ed, and I zipped around chatting to as many people as possible, with my tech buddy Dave in support (if questions got too technical!). I met one person who said she worked at Harvey, a startup that's using generative AI to help lawyers operate more efficiently and automate parts of legal work. I asked what she did, and she said she was a lawyer. I assumed she'd be a software engineer, working for an AI startup. But no, she's a fully qualified attorney who, instead of advising clients, helps to train Harvey's AI models to be better at law. Right on cue, BI's Melia Russell has an in-depth, exclusive look at Harvey. She visited founder Winston Weinberg and learned some important scoopy stuff about the company's latest moves and how it's tackling growing competition in the suddenly hot legal tech market. The legal profession is pretty well suited to large language models and generative AI. It's based mostly on rules, laws, and other dense, complicated text. Legions of law firm associates usually spend years learning how to parse and interpret this information for clients. Now, all this content, along with decades of legal decisions and other records, is being used as training data to develop specialized AI models and tools. AI needs high-quality training data, and in the legal profession there's a ton of it. The end result is tools like Harvey that can automate some of the busy work that previously bogged lawyers down, and could change how the entire profession operates. You know what other industry has AI potential? Consulting. The Big Four, Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG, are investing in AI agents to "liberate" employees from thousands of hours of work a year. For instance, generative AI tools are pretty good at creating PowerPoint slide presentations. Do you feel liberated? News++ Other BI tech stories that caught my eye lately: Check out BI's amazing Seed 100 project! Exclusive: Microsoft is working on a new Copilot, and a grand "Agent Factory" vision. Meta's Llama has reached a turning point. Exclusive: Amazon hopes AI-powered robots will help it hire fewer humans. Exclusive: We found 200 "podcasts" peddling opioids. Spotify is taking them down. Eval time My take on who's up and down in the tech industry right now, including updates on Big Tech employee pay. This is based on an evolving, unscientific system I developed myself. (A bit like AI model benchmarking these days!) UP: Tim Cook probably breathed a sigh of relief after the US and China paused those really high tariffs. Although it's not out of the woods yet, Apple stock jumped this week. DOWN: Google is in an antitrust quagmire, and ChatGPT may be eating into its prized Search business. Take a look at this metric. It's not great. We'll see if the company has answers next week at its big I/O conference. COMP UPDATE: This data from made me look. Software engineers (SWEs) — if you're not in AI, your tech compensation may not rise as much as it once did: From the group chat Other Big Tech stories I found on the interwebs: Meta is struggling to improve its next big AI model. (WSJ) Are you ready to " eye-scroll"? (Bloomberg) The huge Stargate AI project is facing delays. (Bloomberg) Microsoft and OpenAI are in negotiations to revise their partnership. (FT) Perplexity's valuation jumped to $14 billion in a new funding round. (WSJ) AI playground This is the time each week when I try an AI tool. Is it better than what I could have done myself? Was it faster and more efficient than asking a technical colleague for help? I need you, dear reader, to help. What am I doing wrong? What should I do, or use, next week? Let me know. I started off simple. I asked ChatGPT (Enterprise 4o) to create an image that sums up the past week in tech. I told it to use Business Insider style. Here's what it came up with: This is after a couple of pretty bad initial attempts. The image is not bad, but not amazing. The Samsung blue blob logo is floating by itself down there. Why? Who knows? It's true that Google is prepping for I/O. It also seems to have mixed up Apple and Samsung? And I couldn't find news related to new real-time features added recently to OpenAI's GPT-4o model. (I asked OpenAI's PR dept and will let you know if they respond.) It used an old BI logo, too. User feedback I would love to hear from anyone who reads this newsletter. What am I doing wrong? What do you want to see more of? Specifically, though: This week, I want to hear back from folks who work in professional services, such as lawyers and consultants. Attorneys: What's your experience been with Harvey AI and similar AI tools so far? Has this tech helped you get stuff done faster and better for clients? Or not? Are you worried legal AI tools might replace you in the end? Will it change the law firm business model? Or is this another tech flash in the pan that won't amount to much? Let Melia Russell and me know at mrussell@ and abarr@
CNBC
07-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Figma introduces 'vibe-coding' AI software design feature
From left, Steven Levy, Wired editor at large, and Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speak onstage at Wired's The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Dec. 3, 2024. Design software startup Figma on Wednesday debuted an artificial intelligence feature to automate the process of building websites and applications. The new feature, called Figma Make, is the company's response to the rise of "vibe-coding" tools, which turn a short written description into the source code necessary for a website. Google and Microsoft have both touted their own "vibe-coding" tools this year. OpenAI has also entered the space, holding acquisition talks with one startup in the space, Windsurf, and reaching out to another called Cursor on multiple occasions, CNBC reported. The move might draw additional business to Figma, which confidentially filed for an initial public offering last month. Many of today's "vibe-coding" products offer a free tier for light use before requesting payment. Figma Make will only be available to those with full seats that start at $16 per person per month when purchased annually. The company is beta-testing the feature with those users. People with premium subscriptions likely work for companies that store font sizes, color combinations and other design assets in Figma. Over time, the new feature will be able to create designs that adhere to those design systems. Figma's new tool relies on Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model. For those who don't want to start from scratch, Figma Make can alternatively accept Figma design files as an input and generate code that approximates them. Third-party products such as Vercel's v0 and StackBlitz's offer similar capability but can't inherit existing design systems. Like many other "vibe-coding" programs, Figma Make presents a chat box to ask for and receive adjustments of drafts it comes up with. But sometimes a simple fix such as a font change is all that's necessary. Drop-down menus for specific elements allow for quick alterations, meaning that there's no need to consult the AI model again and wait for a response. Customers who received early access to Figma Make got it to craft video games, a note-taking app and a personalized calendar, a spokesperson said. That doesn't mean there's no place for designers inside companies with the advent of AI. "The more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in a designer's role — and believe that it's going to be one of the critical roles in bulding software in the future," Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, said in conversation recently with Garry Tan, president and CEO of Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator. Also on Wednesday, Figma said it was beginning to test Figma Sites, another feature that requires full seats. It can convert designs into working websites. Support for AI code generation will follow in the next few weeks, Figma said. WATCH: The rise of AI 'vibe coding'
