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Comment by sailfast | Hacker News Reader

If the models get that good you won’t need Lovable at all. That’s the strange part - the model companies will instead eat the infra layer (at least I’d imagine that’s what happens - Claude just knows how to manage AWS for you). This seems like a very shallow moat into which to pour $400M.

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People still need a platform to host their app. AWS is far too complicated for the average person. Even with AI to help. The user still needs to get past the registration screen and put their credit card. Most will panic and run as soon as they see the letters "AWS", "IAM" and "EC2"

Then as soon as their agent hits the first bug "port already in use" they will run... Any brave soul who remains, after spending a whole day solving similar issues back to back, will be like "The port has been freed up, my nginx proxy has been configured, my nginx has been launched with systemd and my app server too! The socket ulimit has been increased, I still can't see my app!!!" Then Claude be like "Well of course, silly human! To achieve this simple task, you would have to update your security group inbound firewall rules, duh!"

Then the user be like "Claude, we fixed everything! I cannot see my app still!" Then Claude be like "You goofball, we didn't even get round to purchasing your domain name, moving it to CloudFlare DNS and configuring the A record, CNAME and AAAA record for IPv6 in your Zone file... Not to mention the MX record. You also need to obtain a signed SSL/TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt, then modify your nginx config to install the SSL certificate... Oh then we'll need to configure your nginx to act as a terminating reverse proxy for your WebSocket connection... Oh actually before we do any of that we should set up your schema validation logic and access control logic on your app server with rate limiting and backpressure monitoring... Then we'll set you up on Git version control with a CI/CD pipeline with precommit and PR hooks to run your test suite and code linting... Then we want to keep the registration and login flow of your app real simple, like stupid simple, so we'll get you a Keycloak instance acting as an OAuth2/OIDC identity provider for authentication with an email verification step which will involve us configuring the realm and creating an OAuth client and setting up the SMTP email server... Too easy!

Totally agree - but do you think that is a 13 billion dollar moat that Anthropic would not be able to solve through branded integrations and connectors?

I’d imagine they’re already working with folks like Stripe, AWS, etc on exactly this at the moment potentially? I guess that’s where Lovable comes in. And now the money makes sense. Do the raise and become an acquisition target so one of the labs doesn’t have to do it themselves.

I suppose that Anthropic or any of the other companies that develop foundational AI models do this. This would be a vertical integration strategy. However, they would spend less time developing the best foundational models, so they might not want to keep a more focused product vision, and keep their capital focused on build better models and improving Claude.

Yes, they will be able to do this, but it's a lot of work, and Lovable has a pretty good head start.

Frontier model providers are already doing this. Claude has artifacts which are served on an online URL, and OpenAI has sites, similarly. I don't think it's a distraction from their model making, those are separate teams, and thus we don't need Lovable, the frontier model providers will vertically integrate.

They’re good enough already. You can one-shot a website with Claude Code or Codex of the same or better quality than Lovable. I have no idea what the appeal of the product is at this point.

may help thinking through what you'd have to do to go from the generated web app to get it running on a website, may be with subscribers, payments, etc. and then operating it. There are so many concepts, constructs, terminology one needs to know to do it without ongoing headaches. Lovable at least takes away some of those pains.

> at least I’d imagine that’s what happens - Claude just knows how to manage AWS for you

AWS has $100+bn reasons per year to not let that happen. As techies learned slowly through the evolution of the internet: political power > money > tech.

Amazon doesn't care, they let all sorts of wrappers work on their platform, like Vercel.

Because they don't threaten their platform, they're a customer. If Vercel ever becomes more than a flea and somehow realistically threatens AWS' success, they will either be acquired or hobbled.

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