I joined the AI For Good Hackathon from OSU AI club and got to work with my friend, Loc, on a project. Right now, with our wireframe finished, we got to the frontend building stage with Lovable. Honestly, after using it for two hours, I missed the convenient of coding agent like Claude Code.
- Using Lovable was slow. I asked question and it took a minute just to respond, after scanning the codebase a bit. Seems like prompting was only ever useful for building more stuff.
- The code editor took a bit of getting used to. It is not VS Code because its behaviour was different.
- Each prompt takes 1 credit or more, depending on how big the change is. If you buy a Pro plan, that will give you 100 credits, which will fly away very fast when you try to change the page using prompts.
- The preview was slow as snail. I ran the codebase on my local machine and of course it was faster. But I expect the preview to be at least more tolerable.
- Code is in TanStack Start. Yes, the framework that got a supply chain attack last week. So I plan to move to Next.js as soon as possible. Next.js is not my favorite, but it's industry standard.
I will admit, Lovable UI looked polished and appealing to people who don't code very much. And they had premade templates that looked pretty good. They would have come in handy when I were still making landing page and the design for Papersy. But I feel like it costs a lot of tokens to do something that for the same money, Claude Code can do faster. And you could implement things beyond simple landing page stuff. At least Lovable found its niche, beautiful static site generator. I wouldn't trust it with anything else, despite it offering its own database and AI.
Here is a sneak peek of JobbedIn, an AI agent that use your resume, job description to research the company, review and match your resume to the job requirements, create personalized cover letters and Linkedin messages.
