[tezza]

Q: Has anyone on HN built anything meaningful with Lovable/Bolt? Something that works as intended?

I’ve tried several proof of concepts with Bolt and every time just get into a doom loop where there is a cycle of breakage, each ‘fix’ resurrecting a previous ‘break’

[paulgb]

I had a trip with my family and used v0 to create an itinerary app with a timeline view of our flights, hotel/airbnb bookings, activities, etc.

It was the only thing I’ve 100% vibe-coded without writing a line of code myself. It worked pretty well. In an earlier era I might have used a shared google doc but this was definitely a better experience.

If you’re looking for things to use lovable/bolt for, I’d say don’t use it for software you otherwise would have written by hand; use it for the software you would never have written at all.

[joshdavham]

> don’t use it for software you otherwise would have written by hand; use it for the software you would never have written at all

Very well put. Maybe a will try out vibe coding some time after all.

[api]

Even better use it to prototype, to play, to fling spaghetti at the wall. If something works but the AI code sucks, rewrite the thing that works by hand.

This could massively accelerate experimentation.

[exiguus]

Currently, my team and I use v0, (and try Lovable, or Bolt) as tools for fast prototyping. Mostly, Product Owners and Architects create functional prototypes to support Epics. We use these prototypes to communicate with stakeholders, suggest solutions, and verify requirements. We discard the code from these tools and sometimes only take screenshots.

[throwacct]

This is a sane approach. I'll try to propose this to the team to see if this sticks, hehe.

[janpot]

was quite impressed after building my label maker application [1] and stylex playground [2]. Had some real world needs and both were built in bolt with 99% of edits made through prompts. My tips would mostly center around:

- don't try to fix mistakes, revert and try with an updated prompt. the context seems to get polluted otherwise.

- don't treat it as a black box, inspect the generated code and prompt to write specific abstractions. don't just tell it what to build, but also how. this is where experienced programmers will get way more mileage.

[1] https://courageous-toffee-e5dd6f.netlify.app/

[2] https://venerable-melomakarona-255f96.netlify.app/

[dustincoates]

It depends how you define meaningful.

I built a daily newsletter with myself as the only recipient using v0. It hits the Gemini API and returns a short story based on a historical event from that day in the language(s) that I'm learning, along with a translation, transliteration where applicable, vocabulary list from the story, and grammar tips.

I've had work in the past where I spent way too long building email templates, so having that all done for me, along with the script for sending the mail, was useful. It took an afternoon project that I probably would have abandoned, into an hour project.

With that said, I'm pretty bearish on these platforms, because I think you can't build anything beyond a toy like that. And for toys or short scripts, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT are usually good enough.

[nichochar]

disclaimer: building a competitor (https://getmocha.com)

Lovable and bolt took a massive shortcut: they outsourced the backend to a third party (supabase).

This makes their ceiling to build "useful" software incredibly low.

The right approach takes a lot more time: pick an opinionated framework (think ror) and build up a full stack app builder from the ground up.

Took us months and months of work to get it working, but now people _can_ build "useful" software (thats our bar)

[throwacct]

Is this similar to the "vibe" code tool sold to Wix?

[nichochar]

yes same category

[solarkraft]

I recently played a little story based game that was hosted on Lovable. It worked reasonably well!

[velcrovan]

I too have tried them and would like to know this.