The full schedule for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS has been announced, featuring Best of 2024 overview talks for the AI Startup Landscape, Computer Vision, Open Models, Transformers Killers, Synthetic Data, Agents, and Scaling, and speakers from Sarah Guo of Conviction, Roboflow, AI2/Meta, Recursal/Together, HuggingFace, OpenHands and SemiAnalysis. Join us for the IRL event/Livestream!

Alessio will also be holding a meetup at AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas this Wednesday. See our new Events page for dates of AI Engineer Summit, Singapore, and World’s Fair in 2025. LAST CALL for questions for our big 2024 recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!

When we first observed that GPT Wrappers are Good, Actually, we did not even have Bolt on our radar. Since we recorded our Anthropic episode discussing building Agents with the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Bolt.new (by Stackblitz) has easily cleared the $8m ARR bar, repeating and accelerating its initial $4m feat.

There are very many AI code generators and VS Code forks out there, but Bolt probably broke through initially because of its incredible zero shot low effort app generation:

But as we explain in the pod, Bolt also emphasized deploy (Netlify)/ backend (Supabase)/ fullstack capabilities on top of Stackblitz’s existing WebContainer full-WASM-powered-developer-environment-in-the-browser tech. Since then, the team has been shipping like mad (with weekly office hours), with bugfixing, full screen, multi-device, long context, diff based edits (using speculative decoding like we covered in Inference, Fast and Slow).

All of this has captured the imagination of low/no code builders like Greg Isenberg and many others on YouTube/TikTok/Reddit/X/Linkedin etc:

Just as with Fireworks, our relationship with Bolt/Stackblitz goes a bit deeper than normal - swyx advised the launch and got a front row seat to this epic journey, as well as demoed it with Realtime Voice at the recent OpenAI Dev Day. So we are very proud to be the first/closest to tell the full open story of Bolt/Stackblitz!

Flow Engineering + Qodo/AlphaCodium Update

In year 2 of the pod we have been on a roll getting former guests to return as guest cohosts (Harrison Chase, Aman Sanger, Jon Frankle), and it was a pleasure to catch Itamar Friedman back on the pod, giving us an update on all things Qodo and Testing Agents from our last catchup a year and a half ago:

Qodo (they renamed in September) went viral in early January this year with AlphaCodium (paper here, code here) beating DeepMind’s AlphaCode with high efficiency:

With a simple problem solving code agent:

* The first step is to have the model reason about the problem. They describe it using bullet points and focus on the goal, inputs, outputs, rules, constraints, and any other relevant details.

* Then, they make the model reason about the public tests and come up with an explanation of why the input leads to that particular output.

* The model generates two to three potential solutions in text and ranks them in terms of correctness, simplicity, and robustness.

* Then, it generates more diverse tests for the problem, covering cases not part of the original public tests.

* Iteratively, pick a solution, generate the code, and run it on a few test cases.

* If the tests fail, improve the code and repeat the process until the code passes every test.

swyx has previously written similar thoughts on types vs tests for putting bounds on program behavior, but AlphaCodium extends this to AI generated tests and code.

More recently, Itamar has also shown that AlphaCodium’s techniques also extend well to the o1 models:

Making Flow Engineering a useful technique to improve code model performance on every model. This is something we see AI Engineers uniquely well positioned to do compared to ML Engineers/Researchers.

Full Video Podcast

Like and subscribe!

Show Notes

* Itamar

* Qodo

* First episode

* Eric

* Bolt

* StackBlitz

* Thinkster

* AlphaCodium

* WebContainers

Chapters

* 00:00:00 Introductions & Updates

* 00:06:01 Generic vs. Specific AI Agents

* 00:07:40 Maintaining vs Creating with AI

* 00:17:46 Human vs Agent Computer Interfaces

* 00:20:15 Why Docker doesn't work for Bolt

* 00:24:23 Creating Testing and Code Review Loops

* 00:28:07 Bolt's Task Breakdown Flow

* 00:31:04 AI in Complex Enterprise Environments

* 00:41:43 AlphaCodium

* 00:44:39 Strategies for Breaking Down Complex Tasks

* 00:45:22 Building in Open Source

* 00:50:35 Choosing a product as a founder

* 00:59:03 Reflections on Bolt Success

* 01:06:07 Building a B2C GTM

* 01:18:11 AI Capabilities and Pricing Tiers

* 01:20:28 What makes Bolt unique

* 01:23:07 Future Growth and Product Development

* 01:29:06 Competitive Landscape in AI Engineering

* 01:30:01 Advice to Founders and Embracing AI

* 01:32:20 Having a baby and completing an Iron Man

Transcript

Alessio [00:00:00 ]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.

Swyx [00:00:12 ]: Hey, and today we're still in our sort of makeshift in-between studio, but we're very delighted to have a former returning guest host, Itamar. Welcome back.

Itamar [00:00:21 ]: Great to be here after a year or more. Yeah, a year and a half.

Swyx [00:00:24 ]: You're one of our earliest guests on Agents. Now you're CEO co-founder of Kodo. Right. Which has just been renamed. You also raised a $40 million Series A, and we can get caught up on everything, but we're also delighted to have our new guest, Eric. Welcome.

Eric [00:00:42 ]: Thank you. Excited to be here. Should I say Bolt or StackBlitz?

Swyx [00:00:45 ]: Like, is it like its own company now or?

Eric [00:00:47 ]: Yeah. Bolt's definitely bolt.new. That's the thing that we're probably the most known for, I imagine, at this point.

Swyx