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.
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)