My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
I’m curious about that too. Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a “beta” (in the sense of gauging customer interest, not commitment to release).
If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.
Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going?
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
I recently^1 came across an analysis of no-code tools/platforms vs AI IDEs / Harnesses, and their relative usage and trajectories, and it looked pretty dismal for nocode.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
Yes, I use it actually for something very unsual (I guess): Vibe coding a classic Point & Click adventure. Only in German so far and very early in development:
I actually do know someone who's building a small community with Lovable. It's not a big community and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it, but it's all done via Lovable.
Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
My friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
This is not crazy. What's crazy is one of their favourte stories, Viver de IA [Brazil], a company that uses AI to build an AI education company.
I feel like this valuation could be cut by 75% if Anthropic paid more attention to Claude Design.
I’m curious about that too. Claude Design feels (and from the blog post) sounds like the typical IC passion project that got just polished enough for a “beta” (in the sense of gauging customer interest, not commitment to release).
If someone with clout at Anthropic takes it up as a champion and pushes it into the portfolio of apps at the importance of Claude code, it could be an amazing product, eventually a threat to Adobe, Lovable, Canva market share. It needs a better direct editing layer like 2-way figma sync, so you’re not stuck only prompting for every small adjustment. It could really use smart routing of image generation requests to a nano-banana level image generation model for the images that get poured into the ui mockups (so you don’t need to round trip to external sources by hand). And of course, like all modern LLMs doing visual work, it lacks “taste” if not given extensive examples during prompting.
Right now it feels like a fun proof of concept that could be killed at any time ala Google’s many “I got my PM promoted at launch and then was promptly abandoned” projects.
many such cases in Anthropic's product portfolio
Yeah. IMHO Claude Design's current UX is so abysmal, it's borderline unusable. Kind of ironic, given its remit.
you should see what happened to Airtable recently. Much more than 75%
This is crazy. Do people still use Lovable, I know they were super popular before Codex/Claude Code, but since then, I feel most people (even non-engineers from what I seen) have moved to these tools. Is Lovable still the easiest way to get an site/app going?
And as a side note, what are people's thought on the best coding agent for frontend dev?
I recently^1 came across an analysis of no-code tools/platforms vs AI IDEs / Harnesses, and their relative usage and trajectories, and it looked pretty dismal for nocode.
1. I'll edit or reply to my comment if I get a sec to dig up the URL.
Yes, I use it actually for something very unsual (I guess): Vibe coding a classic Point & Click adventure. Only in German so far and very early in development:
https://schmerz-radio.com/
I actually do know someone who's building a small community with Lovable. It's not a big community and he's still figuring out how to/if he wants to monetize it, but it's all done via Lovable.
I have genuinely never heard of Lovable and I thought I was relatively plugged in to the tech zeitgeist :/
Maybe I'm too much of a CLI guy (always preferred Vim & co. to Rubymine/VS Code/etc)
It was one of the earliest “create a whole web app from a prompt” type of product IIRC. The space is now more than crowded
Wonder of any of the early money got out. Very little visibility to the secondary market on these things. I remember back in dot-com days folk would take leverage on their unrealized gains. Didn't work out that well. Selling at small discount in the secondary, which was mocked, turned out to be a good play.
Seems lots of the market for tools like this is un-moat-able. Hopefully someone smarter than me shares their experience with that.
blah blah bubble