Battle Bots: Six AI Chatbots Face Off to Debug an Issue Building in Bolt.New

Who will triumph? A complete guide to how ChatGPT, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude help (or not) a non-engineer getting out of a bug doom loop on Bolt.

We see tools like Bolt.new and Lovable.dev advertising that it’s as easy as a command to build an app. Cursor puts up billboards in San Francisco saying you can just hit tab and ship. The message is clear: building is solved.

Except that it’s NOT. We get into doom loops so quickly, because of limited context windows, or training cutoff dates that mean that up-to-date documentation isn’t included in the AI, or simply because we’re out of our depth technically.

If you’re an engineer, this is going to read like a pretty simple de-bug. As a non-engineer, this feels really intimidating. Either way, this is a finger-tip guide with real examples to how LLMs handle technical exercises. If you want to know how these models feel in practice without spending an arm and a leg, this post will give you a sense of communication style, ability to infer meaning, and level of default technical detail.

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A tail of a Bolt bug gone bad…

A few days ago, my non-engineer friend got stuck debugging an OAuth issue on Bolt.new. He was building a proof of concept—a family photo viewer powered by Google Photos and a facial recognition library—but kept seeing HTTP errors with status: 0 in the console and empty blobs instead of real images.

He tried asking Bolt’s AI assistant repeatedly but got stuck in a “doom loop,” seeing the same advice over and over. So, he turned to me—and I decided to rope in six different Large Language Models to see how each would tackle the same prompt.

Because I’m a nerd and I love to suffer I guess.

Anyway, below, you’ll find a breakdown of:

1. The underlying issue (Google OAuth misconfiguration).

2. The responses from each LLM (and how easy they are for non-technical folks to follow).

3. A 6‐category grading rubric (accuracy, clarity, completeness, reasoning, potential risks, and accessibility to non‐engineers).

If you’re curious how these AI tools stack up when guiding a non-developer through a fairly common but confusing error, read on!