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Hi, welcome to another video. So, a few days ago, I talked about how there are not many open-source alternatives to Bolt and just the most simple vibe coding landscape. That's why I had covered Diad at the time. But now, we have something that aims to fix that problem. And this is Quests.
Quests is an open-source app builder. It is a desktop app that allows you to build proper React apps in a very simple-to-use interface. The interface is insanely minimal. You can run it on all kinds of operating systems and it's open source so you can edit it for your needs or contribute.
It seems that it currently only builds apps with Vite, Hono probably for the back end, and OPC. It uses pretty good conventions and since you will mostly be creating smaller apps with something like this, it uses Vite which is much better in my opinion for smaller apps. It's also much faster and easier to maintain and it uses newer conventions like OPC for generally more professional and better apps which is great because many of them just slap Next.js and build on top of that which is obviously not as performant for smaller apps.
It is new so it doesn't have some features. For example, I'd have liked to have an option to select a stack between multiple ones along with some more options which I'll talk about as we proceed. Let's get into it.
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Now back to the video. So after installing it, you'd have to set up a provider. You can select between Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and even Open Router and Vercel AI gateway. You are not yet able to add custom OpenAI compatible or Anthropic compatible endpoints, which is a bummer, and I hope that is fixed soon. I'd recommend you set up Open Router as you'll get some free options through there including DeepSeek v3.1 for free which is awesome for these tasks. That's it for the setup and you'll get right into it where you can start using it.
Now the interface is what I like the most about this. First of all, it's very simple, which I really like. If Bolt is Jira, then this is Linear, and you'll actually see that going forward as well. It also takes up way less memory. It sits at about 200 MB on average use, which is really awesome. It does some things that are different from other options and uses a rather browser-like interface.
On the top, you have things that look like tabs. This is really an efficient way, I think, to manage multiple tasks because you can just create multiple tabs here, similar to a browser and then build out stuff and just go back and forth. This also has a status icon which shows up when a task is going on in a tab or if it's complete, which you'll see in the next steps. You also have a sidebar here. At the bottom, you have Discover where you can see some examples of stuff made with it. These are just local examples that you can check out in order to understand how it works.
Then the main thing is the prompt box and the model picker. You can just type in what you want it to do and then select the model and it will just get on it. So let's just get into it. I'm going to ask it to build me a simple movie tracker app.
Now what you'll see is that it will go ahead and start to work on this. On the left, you can see it start to work on this. It can use all kinds of tools and everything as well. On the right, you can see that the preview will appear once it gets done. Let's wait a bit and it will get done. So it's now done. And on the left, you can see the chat and everything while on the right, you can see the preview. You can see that it looks pretty good and doesn't have a lot of issues.
You can also run it yourself in the browser as well by just opening this URL. This is quite good as it just makes a URL on localhost in order to allow you to open it in the browser and test it. You can also hit the "Open in" option where you'll get the option to open in terminal, cursor, VS Code, Finder, and even an external browser that will just open it up and allow you to probably take it even further.
Now, here it lacks some features. It doesn't allow you to set environment variables. So, if you do try to make something that requires environment variables, then that wouldn't work as of now. I hope that is added soon as well. You can also change the title of the app and add a reference icon and colors in order to let you navigate between projects that you build here easily. It also shows you the tokens used, but it doesn't show you the cost incurred. It would have been great to see that here as well, but that isn't available yet.
Now, if I want, I can just hit the "Add tab" at the top or just hit Command + T. And now it will create a new tab. And we can ask it to do something else here. Let me ask it to make me a simple Minesweeper game here just to show how you can kick off multiple tasks. Anyway, let's just send it. And this will also go ahead and start to work. Actually, let's also create another tab here. And now let's ask it to make me a simple autoplay chess game. And now let's send it. And what you'll see is that it will also go ahead and start to work on this.
Now you can go back and forth between all of them and check the stuff for yourself. It's really awesome to do this and almost make it behave like a browser. It's quite awesome if you ask me. It works kind of well. There are some advanced things that are missing like the ability to import existing projects or even attaching images doesn't seem to be supported yet. And stuff like selecting elements to ask for changes or creating rules or custom providers and things like that are not yet supported. And it makes sense because it is a first-gen app that is aiming to solve something.
I'll probably be using this myself because I think that this is much snappier than something like Diad. You can open it up with a click. It is fast. You can spawn multiple agents at a time and navigate easily and all the stuff like that which is pretty awesome. This is exactly what I would have liked the open-source community to have because it was quite funny to me how the open-source community didn't have a good alternative to something like Bolt or Lovable. I hope it gets the Supabase integration and features like that. I really like the trajectory it's going on and I hope that it keeps getting updated to make it a powerhouse. Overall, it's pretty cool.
Anyway, share your thoughts below and subscribe to the channel. You can also donate via Superthx option or join the channel as well and get some perks. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.
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