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FAQ

How do I get the best results with oTToDev?

  • Be specific about your stack: If you want to use specific frameworks or libraries (like Astro, Tailwind, ShadCN, or any other popular JavaScript framework), mention them in your initial prompt to ensure Bolt scaffolds the project accordingly.

  • Use the enhance prompt icon: Before sending your prompt, try clicking the 'enhance' icon to have the AI model help you refine your prompt, then edit the results before submitting.

  • Scaffold the basics first, then add features: Make sure the basic structure of your application is in place before diving into more advanced functionality. This helps oTToDev understand the foundation of your project and ensure everything is wired up right before building out more advanced functionality.

  • Batch simple instructions: Save time by combining simple instructions into one message. For example, you can ask oTToDev to change the color scheme, add mobile responsiveness, and restart the dev server, all in one go saving you time and reducing API credit consumption significantly.

How do I contribute to oTToDev?

Please check out our dedicated page for contributing to oTToDev here!

Do you plan on merging oTToDev back into the official Bolt.new repo?

More news coming on this coming early next month - stay tuned!

What are the future plans for oTToDev?

Check out our Roadmap here!

Lot more updates to this roadmap coming soon!

Why are there so many open issues/pull requests?

oTToDev was started simply to showcase how to edit an open source project and to do something cool with local LLMs on my (@ColeMedin) YouTube channel! However, it quickly grew into a massive community project that I am working hard to keep up with the demand of by forming a team of maintainers and getting as many people involved as I can. That effort is going well and all of our maintainers are ABSOLUTE rockstars, but it still takes time to organize everything so we can efficiently get through all the issues and PRs. But rest assured, we are working hard and even working on some partnerships behind the scenes to really help this project take off!

How do local LLMs fair compared to larger models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet for oTToDev/Bolt.new?

As much as the gap is quickly closing between open source and massive close source models, you’re still going to get the best results with the very large models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and DeepSeek Coder V2 236b. This is one of the big tasks we have at hand - figuring out how to prompt better, use agents, and improve the platform as a whole to make it work better for even the smaller local LLMs!

I'm getting the error: "There was an error processing this request"

If you see this error within oTToDev, that is just the application telling you there is a problem at a high level, and this could mean a number of different things. To find the actual error, please check BOTH the terminal where you started the application (with Docker or pnpm) and the developer console in the browser. For most browsers, you can access the developer console by pressing F12 or right clicking anywhere in the browser and selecting “Inspect”. Then go to the “console” tab in the top right.

I'm getting the error: "x-api-key header missing"

We have seen this error a couple times and for some reason just restarting the Docker container has fixed it. This seems to be Ollama specific. Another thing to try is try to run oTToDev with Docker or pnpm, whichever you didn’t run first. We are still on the hunt for why this happens once and a while!

I'm getting a blank preview when oTToDev runs my app!

We promise you that we are constantly testing new PRs coming into oTToDev and the preview is core functionality, so the application is not broken! When you get a blank preview or don’t get a preview, this is generally because the LLM hallucinated bad code or incorrect commands. We are working on making this more transparent so it is obvious. Sometimes the error will appear in developer console too so check that as well.

Everything works but the results are bad

This goes to the point above about how local LLMs are getting very powerful but you still are going to see better (sometimes much better) results with the largest LLMs like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and DeepSeek Coder V2 236b. If you are using smaller LLMs like Qwen-2.5-Coder, consider it more experimental and educational at this point. It can build smaller applications really well, which is super impressive for a local LLM, but for larger scale applications you want to use the larger LLMs still!