BoltAI Projects, DeepSeek support and more

Hi everyone. I wish you a Happy New Year.

This is probably the biggest update in the last few months. I planned to release this as a Christmas present but just like any esteemed developer, my estimation is obviously way way off 😄

This is one of those updates where I'm really proud of the end result. Let's dive in, shall we?

TL;DR:

• BoltAI Projects is here. Keep chats, files, custom instructions and other configurations in one place.

• Official support for the DeepSeek platform.

• Better support for Amazon Bedrock: setting AWS_SESSION_TOKEN or use your AWS credential profile.

• Significant improvement to the sidebar: better performance and improved UX.

• Improved search UI: global search bar on the sidebar and local findbar on each chat.

• Other bug fixes & improvements

BoltAI Projects

Similarly to ChatGPT & Claude app, BoltAI Projects lets you keep chats, files & other configurations in one place. Any new chat within this project can access to its files, inherit its system instructions and other configurations.

You can also use it as a dumb folder just like before.

To start, click the "New Project" button in the bottom left of the sidebar, or use the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + N .

You can then add files to the project, set custom System Instructions or set the default AI service/model/plugins...

Project files

Attach relevant documents, code and other files to the project to reuse them later on each chat. You can also attach separated document for each chat so it would not affect other chats within the project.

When working with source code, you can also enable File Sync so the source content is always up-to-date.

System Instructions and other configurations

When you start a new chat within a project, it automatically inherits the project's configuration: System Instructions, default AI Service & Model and default enabled plugins.

Navigation

Building a good navigation UX when working with projects is surprisingly hard. Thanks to the feedback from beta testers*, I think the current UX is quite good. Do share your feedback if you found an issue.

Here are some quick notes:

• To start a new chat within a project, click the plus button on the right side of the Project List Item, or select the project and press Command + N

• To move chats to the parent folder or to a different project, drag and drop chats from the project view to the left sidebar.

• To open the Project View Mode, double-clicking the project or click "See All". In Project View Mode, all chats within the project are in the sidebar.

Sidebar

Many BoltAI's performance & stability issues come from the sidebar. In this release, I reimplemented the sidebar and it works a lot better (10x better). It's not an exaggeration. I tested with a few thousands chats and see no performance issues at all. Previously, BoltAI would struggle to render just a few hundreds chats.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

DeepSeek support

DeepSeek recently released their flagship model, deepseek-v3 on their DeepSeek Platform. DeepSeek v3 has an impressive performance, even on-par with GPT-4o on some benchmarks. BoltAI now fully supports the DeepSeek platform.

Go to Settings > Models, click the plus button and select DeepSeek.

Improved Amazon Bedrock support

In this release, I added support for AWS short-lived credentials. There are 2 ways you can use this:

1. Setting the AWS Session Token or

2. Read credentials from your credentials configuration file ~/.aws/credentials .

Make sure to select the correct region. You can read more here.

Other improvements

New Model Selection UI

Swipe gestures support

Swipe left to archive & delete chats, swipe right to star.

Improved Search UI

Inspired by the iMessage app, I moved the global searchbar to the sidebar (keyboard shortcut command + shift + f) and added a new findbar on top of the chat view (keyboard shortcut command + f)

Improved Assistant & System Instructions UI

You can easily select an Assistant, or customize the System Instruction in the Inspector pane.

New floating options for New Chat & New Temporary Chat windows

Go to Settings > Shortcuts to enable this settings. Once enabled, you can start a new chat window even in fullscreen mode.

Better keyboard supports

• Select next/previous chats with Command+Shift+[ and Command+Shift+]

• Select pinned chats using Command+1 to Command+9

Other bug fixes

• Fixed the issue where Gemini 2.0 Flash model cannot use Grounding Tool

• Removed the "Context Length" requirement for Custom Server

• Fixed the issue where BoltAI's sending empty system instruction

• Fixed the issue where O1 models not working for some users

• Fixed some crashes related to the sidebar

And that's it for now

I'm sorry for the delay of the iOS app. I got sidetracked by the Projects feature and wasn't able to make much progress with the iOS app. Going back to it now.

See you in the next updates 👋

*Thanks to Andrey, Alex, Victor, Roseofwolf and other beta testers to help me with this release.