Feedback on Replit and Lovable to prototype a web application

Finished a 2-week « sprint » testing Replit and Lovable for building a prototype of a web app.

Far from being a prompt engineer (so 2023) or a thought leader on the video coding, but what you read on those tools everywhere is true. I have not really coded since 8 years now, so the new tools or languages like React, TypeScript, etc., are unknown to me in a practical sense (I read regularly articles about the state of the software development to maintain some sort of awareness of the field).

All this to say that I have approached these tools as an amateur but with some perspective. I’m blown away by the ease to build something with either of those tools.

I coded the same app in both tools using their paid subscription (25$ USD per month).

Lovable is perfect for someone like me that doesn’t have practical design skills. I know this is not going to pass a very high threshold in terms of UX (you still need the eyes of a good product designer), but it’s good enough to give life to an idea and iterate on it. It completely removes the (IMHO) high barrier to start designing a web app with a nice look and feel. I started with a brief and some screenshots of existing apps to get a first version, and from there I added features to this UI prototype just by chatting with the agent mode.

And Replit is the same for backend code. I can’t compare it to Cursor or other « serious » AI coding tools, but it feels like a very complete suite of tools for software development. I was able to build a backend that is integrating with several APIs just by asking to use them, and the boilerplate code was correctly generated. I don’t have (yet) any complex features like database, user account management, but it feels like it won’t be difficult to get it done. As for Lovable, I’m sure my code will not muster a close examination for a scalable or testable app, but it gets me going.

Both are using a GitHub integration to host your code, so I was planning to use Lovable to build the UI and then « plug » my backend code in Replit, not sure if this is the way, but I think those 2 tools complement each other well.