AI-First Products Will Win
Maybe not today, maybe you have some lock-in for now. But in a taste test the focused product will win, and eventually that is going to matter.
I love Replit and I love Bolt too.
But when I want to create something I use Bolt (Even though I bought a year of Replit).
Why?
Replit is a coding environment first and then an amazing AI agent afterwards. That means it has all the artefacts of a coding environment. That's great if you're interested in writing code. I am increasingly...not.
Bolt doesn’t have any of that coding baggage. It’s just an AI agent. It's been superbly slimmed down to that function. There is nothing distracting you from its primary function. Describe what you want to build and preview the result.
This is (or will be) the problem for every product right now. Trust that someone somewhere is reinventing your product with this new capability we have.
Even if you are ahead of the curve integrating AI into your existing product, because of the size of the shift thats coming, you’re carrying a lot of assumptions that probably aren't true anymore. It's hard to say goodbye to something that works well, especially if you've invested a lot of time into it and that some people like.
Maybe not today, maybe you have some lock-in for now. But in a taste test the focused product will win, and eventually that is going to matter.
"Most innovation is done as an incremental enhancement of existing products. What about radical ideas, ones that introduce new product categories to the marketplace? These come about by reconsidering the goals, and always asking what the real goal is: what is called the root cause analysis."
(Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things)
