---
type: entity
subtype: person
title: "Eric Simons"
description: "CEO and co-founder of StackBlitz (maker of bolt.new) who announces the partnership making the community fork the official open-source bolt.DIY and frames it as a real-world benchmark frontier labs test models against."
tags: [stackblitz, bolt-diy, open-source]
videos: [breaking-news-ottodev-is-now-the-official-open-source-boltnew]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# Eric Simons

Eric Simons is the CEO and co-founder of [StackBlitz](../organizations/stackblitz.md), maker of [bolt.new](../tools/bolt-new.md), and the counterparty in the deal that turned Cole's community fork into the official open-source version of the product. Cole brings him on camera to announce it: "just wanted to give a quick little segment here with Eric introducing the partnership between automator and stack Blitz" ([0:01:01]). The [oTTomator](../organizations/ottomator.md) think tank's [autodev](../tools/autodev.md) fork was renamed [bolt.diy](../tools/bolt-diy.md) and moved under the StackBlitz Labs GitHub org, keeping its stars, forks, history, PRs, and issues, while the community kept full creative control of the roadmap.

Simons supplies the reasoning behind open-sourcing a commercial product's core: "the reason we open sourced you know kind of the core components of Bolt is when we looked around when we were building bolt you know from scratch there was just no good examples" ([0:02:15]). The gap he is describing is a public reference implementation of a full-stack AI app builder, and releasing one is what made [Community-Driven Development](../../concepts/community-driven-development.md) possible on top of it. The two products then split by intent rather than by feature list: bolt.new stays the stable commercial path for building anything easily, bolt.DIY becomes the fast-moving, run-it-yourself version that swaps in any LLM, including [local models](../../concepts/local-ai.md), and ships cutting-edge features first.

His second durable contribution is a framing Cole repeats: bolt.DIY functions as a real-world coding benchmark. Because it exercises a model against actual full-stack application generation instead of synthetic evals, frontier labs started asking "can it run Bolt?" the way PC gamers once asked "can it run Crysis?" That makes an open-source app builder a shared evaluation surface for the whole industry, and it is why Cole test-drives every new model there within hours of release.

## Works with

- [StackBlitz](../organizations/stackblitz.md) - Maker of the commercial bolt.new; partnered with the open-source bolt.diy community and hosts the repo under its GitHub org.
- [bolt.new](../tools/bolt-new.md) - StackBlitz's commercial AI coding platform that generates entire full-stack applications; the stable product bolt.DIY forks from.
- [bolt.diy](../tools/bolt-diy.md) - The community-run, any-LLM, cutting-edge open-source counterpart to bolt.new.
- [autodev (bolt.new fork)](../tools/autodev.md) - Cole's community-built fork of bolt.new, the project that became bolt.DIY.
- [oTTomator](../organizations/ottomator.md) - Cole's earlier open-source AI community, the think tank home of the fork.
- [Cole Medin](./cole-medin.md) - AI engineer and educator whose YouTube channel and Dynamous community teach agentic coding.

## Related

- [Community-Driven Development](../../concepts/community-driven-development.md) - Building products and open source in public with a community, using a public roadmap and shared learning.
- [Open-Source & Local AI Coding](../../concepts/open-source-ai-coding.md) - Community-maintained, self-hostable AI coding tools and local models that dodge API costs and rate limits.
- [Local & Self-Hosted AI](../../concepts/local-ai.md) - Running open-weight models on your own hardware or cloud for privacy, cost control, and independence from API providers.
- [Real-World Coding Benchmarks](../../concepts/coding-benchmarks.md) - Evaluating coding models on real engineering tasks, and the gap between exploding benchmark scores and flat developer productivity.
- [AI Coding Assistant](../../concepts/ai-coding-assistant.md) - A tool that generates or completes code from short prompts, applying targeted edits and offloading low-leverage software work.

## Sources

- [BREAKING NEWS: oTToDev is Now the OFFICIAL Open Source Bolt.new](../../sources/breaking-news-ottodev-is-now-the-official-open-source-boltnew.md) - "[0:01:01] just wanted to give a quick little segment here with Eric introducing the partnership between automator and stack Blitz."
- [BREAKING NEWS: oTToDev is Now the OFFICIAL Open Source Bolt.new](../../sources/breaking-news-ottodev-is-now-the-official-open-source-boltnew.md) - "[0:02:15] the reason we open sourced you know kind of the core components of Bolt is when we looked around when we were building bolt you know from scratch there was just no good examples."
