I shipped a client reporting tool built with Bolt.new. Three weeks from first prompt to first paying user. Everything worked.
At eleven paying customers, everything still worked. At forty-three, it started getting slow. At eighty simultaneous users, it started timing out. At the exact moment a potential enterprise customer was watching a live demo with six of their colleagues, it went fully unresponsive.
I closed the laptop. Said I would follow up.
Then I spent a week figuring out what I had actually built — and more importantly, what the AI tools had quietly assumed about scale.
The specific thing AI tools don't optimize for
