Building full-stack applications using Bolt (fast)
Paul Gosnell demonstrates how to use Bolt to build full-stack apps in days
Published 2025-03-21
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Do you want to create your own fully functional apps with a little help from AI? Paul Gosnell isn’t just a fan of Bolt—he’s one of its power users, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI-assisted development.
In a recent live workshop, Paul walked us through how he builds full-stack applications with Bolt, taking an idea from concept to working prototype in record time.
Whether you’re a non-developer just getting started with Bolt or an experienced coder diving into AI-enhanced workflows, this workshop is well worth your time.
Here’s a taster of what Paul covered:
Going from idea to MVP in days with Bolt
Paul shared his journey from agency work and startups to discovering Bolt—a tool that completely changed how he approaches building applications. It was love at first sight, with Paul explaining, “I went in, and literally after three or four prompts realized that this is incredible, it’s blowing my mind.”
When Paul created Chilled CRM with Bolt, it took him “probably two weeks, three weeks at a push.” He was astonished at how quickly he could get results, and explained what a game-changer bolt is for busy entrepreneurs or startups:
“We can literally fire up Bolt and within hours or days have a product, which would normally have taken weeks and teams of people to do. It unlocks the creativity and means.”
Live demo: Building an AI-powered children’s storybook
To give us a look at Bolt in action, Paul ran with a real-time suggestion from the audience to build an AI-powered children’s visual storybook.
He talked us through the process of creating a prompt, which involved clarifying what exactly the app would do.
He came up with a prompt to create an interactive iPad-friendly app where parents could read stories to their kids, with features like:
- Preloaded educational stories and kid-friendly YouTube videos
- A fullscreen “read mode” for distraction-free storytelling
- Options to search, filter, and save stories
- A playful, kid-friendly design with a large font size and “good use of bold and bright colors”
Paul explained his approach to prompting Bolt effectively, without getting too detailed about exactly how the app should look.
“I like leaving Bolt to decide how it looks. I'm telling it the features and the functions and the nav items and a user flow and all those things, but the detail of the look and feel, I'll give it a couple of pointers but I'll try and leave it up for grabs.”
After generating the initial app layout, he refined it by testing and debugging live, showing how to fix UI issues like text not wrapping, add missing functionality such as a like button, and improve the design—all without writing code manually.
He drew our attention to making the design intuitive and user-friendly, explaining that if there were no “liked” stories, it would be good to have a message encouraging the user to go in and “like” some to add them to the list. Why? Because, as Paul explained:
“Just from the user experience, you never have empty states. That's the golden rule is when you design something and build something, you need to design it with nothing in. All the empty states have some prompt or some nice words or something for the user.”
How to handle errors and iterate quickly in Bolt
One of the biggest challenges in AI-assisted development is managing errors and making iterative improvements. You’re not going to get it spot-on first time around.
If you’re doing more than iterating, however—like making really major additions—Paul recommends starting over:
“Sometimes it's worth just stopping and starting again rather than trying to pivot something and go again, because you'll just end up burning so much trying to get into known bug holes and recorrect your path.”
Other key debugging tips included:
- Using Bolt’s "fix" button thoughtfully—if it keeps failing, ask the AI to step back and look at the code as a whole.
- Restarting the project—sometimes, closing and reopening the session to reload the project will get it working (without needing to change anything else).
- Explicitly reminding Bolt of previous steps—Bolt has limited context retention, so if Paul stops work on an app and restarts the next day, he’ll “start talking as if it cannot see this or it has no memory of what we've done.”
Beyond the demo: A real-world Bolt-built project
To wrap up, Paul shared a more advanced Bolt-built project—a fully functional salon booking system with features like:
- Stripe integration for payments
- Supabase-powered user authentication and data storage
- Appointment scheduling, where you can set the staff member and the appointment time
- The ability to add team members, their role, and what they specialize in
Paul told us that this app took him less than a week to build.
Wrapping it up
This workshop was a deep dive into AI-assisted development with Bolt, packed with practical insights, live troubleshooting, and real-world examples. You can watch the full session (available to Pro Ben’s Bites members) here.
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