---
type: source
title: "I'm Building the BEST Open Source AI Coding Assistant with YOUR Help"
description: "Cole's community-driven fork of bolt.new adds multi-provider LLM selection (including free local models) and is being improved collaboratively by viewers, with agentic multi-LLM code generation as the headline future goal."
youtube_id: p1YvKuRfEhg
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1YvKuRfEhg
slug: im-building-the-best-open-source-ai-coding-assistant-with-your-help
published: 2024-10-20
duration: "0:16:22"
recency_rank: 151
raw: "../raw/im-building-the-best-open-source-ai-coding-assistant-with-your-help.md"
tags: [open-source, ai-coding, provider-independence, bolt-new]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# I'm Building the BEST Open Source AI Coding Assistant with YOUR Help

Cole recaps his fork of bolt.new, the browser-based AI code generator, whose defining improvement over the official version is that you can choose your LLM provider and model instead of being locked to one. This includes running local models for free via Ollama, plus OpenAI, OpenRouter's model catalog, and Google Gemini 1.5 Flash/Pro. After the original fork video blew up, viewers contributed pull requests, and Cole walks through five community-merged features: OpenRouter integration, Gemini support, dynamic Ollama model listing (only showing models actually pulled locally), provider filtering in the dropdown, and a download-as-zip button to export generated projects.

The video frames the project as a community effort ("our fork, not my fork") and a hands-on way to learn to build with AI, explicitly non-monetized. Cole credits each contributor by name and stresses that the fork is imperfect precisely so the community can improve it together, drawing inspiration from other tools.

The back half covers future work pulled from viewer comments: LM Studio and DeepSeek API integrations, better prompting so smaller local models reliably open the code container (with a stop-and-redo workaround), image attachments, direct publish-to-GitHub, loading existing local projects, and the biggest ambition: running multiple agents/LLMs in the background to generate code more robustly than any single model, potentially via LangGraph/LangChain or OpenAI Swarm.

## Concepts covered

- [Model Selection](../concepts/model-selection.md)
- [Provider Independence](../concepts/provider-independence.md)
- [Community-Driven Development](../concepts/community-driven-development.md)
- [Agent Teams](../concepts/agent-teams.md)
- [Local & Self-Hosted AI](../concepts/local-ai.md)

## Entities

- [bolt.new](../entities/tools/bolt-new.md)
- [Ollama](../entities/tools/ollama.md)
- [OpenRouter](../entities/tools/openrouter.md)
- [Google Gemini 2.0 Flash](../entities/tools/gemini.md)
- [OpenAI](../entities/organizations/openai.md)
- [DeepSeek](../entities/organizations/deepseek.md)
- [GitHub](../entities/tools/github.md)
- [LangChain](../entities/tools/langchain.md)
- [Cole Medin](../entities/people/cole-medin.md)

## Key moments

- **[0:00:00]** Intro: forked bolt.new so you can choose your own LLM, including free local models
- **[0:02:04]** Live demo of the fork with provider/model dropdowns generating a to-do app
- **[0:03:39]** GitHub repo tour: 14 commits ahead, new README section listing requested features
- **[0:04:34]** Community-implemented features: OpenRouter and Gemini integrations
- **[0:05:18]** Dynamic Ollama model listing based on what's actually pulled locally
- **[0:06:06]** Provider filtering and the most-requested feature: download project as zip
- **[0:10:38]** Ollama demo showing only locally downloaded models
- **[0:11:06]** Future work walkthrough from viewer requests
- **[0:13:26]** Biggest future goal: agents running in the background with multiple LLMs
- **[0:15:45]** Closing: non-monetized community project, learning AI together

## Transcript

[Raw transcript](../raw/im-building-the-best-open-source-ai-coding-assistant-with-your-help.md)
