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 · 18h ago
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 · 12h ago
> 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 · 12h ago
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 · 16h ago
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 · 10h ago
This is a sane approach. I'll try to propose this to the team to see if this sticks, hehe.
janpot · 18h ago
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.
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.
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 · 10h ago
Is this similar to the "vibe" code tool sold to Wix?
solarkraft · 18h ago
I recently played a little story based game that was hosted on Lovable. It worked reasonably well!
velcrovan · 19h ago
I too have tried them and would like to know this.
wyxuan · 18h ago
Isn't the whole point of Bolt/stackblitz that you can run node js clientside via wasm, so it's more lightweight?
Did they migrate away to a more server heavy model?
bnchrch · 19h ago
Im always hunting for someone whos solved "sandboxing" because setting it up myself is so damn painful.
Anyone ever find a good product in this space?
Beam seems close, but not quite
nicolaslecomte · 18h ago
Blaxel & E2B use microVMs which is usually the standard for this kind of worloads. E2B feels more ephemeral while Blaxel feels more stateful, depends on what you're looking for. Daytona uses containers, less secure than VMs.
I heard Vercel & Cloudflare launched a sandboxes offering too. Haven't tried it yet but i'm naturally wary of the marketing fluff around their annoucements
transformi · 16h ago
i see they mostly offer api to run the sandbox on their infra...is there a way to host the sandboxes self hosted?(how much memory/compute needed?)
Mernit · 18h ago
what is missing for you?
WXLCKNO · 19h ago
"We’ll be using FastMCP, a lightweight framework for building model-control-plane servers"
Article written by AI (and not reviewed by humans) that doesn't know MCP is model context protocol?
Or author being intentional for some weird reason?
atleastoptimal · 17h ago
The Model-Context-Protocol/Mode Control Plane mix up seems to come up a lot in AI slop articles. I assume its because most AI models’ training cutoff was before Model context protocol became a big thing.
And soon, articles like that one will be ingested into next generation of models, and they would become a bit more nonsensical...
owebmaster · 18h ago
Looks like AI slop
Mernit · 18h ago
We initially wrote this for a less technical audience (where we spelled out MCP), then edited it to post here - it's not AI, it's just bad editing from my part. Fixed now.
arolihas · 18h ago
I'm confused by your explanation. You originally spelled out MCP and then edited it. Did you originally have it as model context protocol and then edited it to model control plane? Or did you originally have it spelled out as model control plane and missed it in editing?
The only Beam-specific part are the sandboxes, but those can easily be swapped out for the vendor of your choice. The architecture we described isn't exclusive to our product.
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’
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.
Very well put. Maybe a will try out vibe coding some time after all.
This could massively accelerate experimentation.
- 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/
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.
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)
Did they migrate away to a more server heavy model?
Anyone ever find a good product in this space?
Beam seems close, but not quite
I heard Vercel & Cloudflare launched a sandboxes offering too. Haven't tried it yet but i'm naturally wary of the marketing fluff around their annoucements
Article written by AI (and not reviewed by humans) that doesn't know MCP is model context protocol?
Or author being intentional for some weird reason?
You can see it here too https://www.unleash.so/post/model-control-plane-mcp-for-ai-a...
Beam is fully OSS BTW: https://github.com/beam-cloud/beta9