End To End Websites - The FULL Stack, using AI

I recently subscribed to a new AI coding platform based on several mentions by people I trust in the Low-Code/No-Code world. I needed to create as quickly and as safely as possible an account management website for one of my applications, with user authentication and ultimately billing too.

Lovable turned out to be just what I needed. If you are looking for a full stack, end-to-end solution that will get your website up and runnig with the vast majority of the functionality you need, I can wholeheartedly recommend Lovable!!!

Simply put, it's incredible what the Lovable team are achieving with their platform. I want to cover my favourite features and also flag some settings you MUST make should you pay for it.

Best Bits

Prompting Focus: For web apps, it's tuned to be the best co-coder/creator. It's truly impressive how it's React-focussed generation gets it right far better than if I wrote it in other Frontier models and copied and pasted it over to Visual Studio Code.

Database, Payments, Email - INTEGRATED: Yup, that's right! If you need to get these crucial business enablers up and running, Lovable is ahead of you and ready to quickly get your project stood up. With security also a critical aspect of the platform, I felt more reassured that my site was being built from the very start with security in mind, and that reflected in how it establishes secure connectivity to Supabase, Resend and Stripe. Very impressive.

Screenshots Work: When I hit issues, I fell back to screenshotting the issue in the User Interace (UI) and voila! As it is focussed already on web development, full stack, it fixed the issue on the first pass. Impressive.

No More Login Pains!: For many users, they plunge into the backend functionality, then try to retrofit the frontend login, security and more and find it terribly hard, especially for non-coders using AI to create their ideas. Due to the tie-ins to Supabase for database operations, and again that focus on web functionality, Lovable just works, and really well.

Death Loop Fines: This is a term I coined for when the AI gets wrapped up in it's own poorly-suggested code, and just keeps repeating the error. Whilst DLF's normally contribute to burning through your credits (you get 5 daily messages and 250 a month quota, basically think of these as how many asks you get of the Lovable platform when asking for stuff) I watched my quota closely and was impressed that I didn't incur a "fine" for something I hadn't created. I still think 250 messages a month is a bit low and I hope they increase this especially for the $50 subscription but its perfectly adequeate to get a project of some complexity up and running in a couple of hours.

Things to Watch

Make sure that should you buy the $20 or better still $50 plan per month at Lovable, you go into your settings and ensure that Private is selected under Default Project Visibility (quick link to settings at Lovable: https://lovable.dev/settings/account). If like me you don't want your fledgling website being exposed to the public, make sure this is therefore selected.

As I say in Best Bits, make sure that you watch those "credits" or messages. With 250 a month I am sure you'll get done what you need, but based on your coding experience, these can be burned through a lot quicker. One tip is to rehearse your prompt outside of Lovable first. Bring up notepad and think like this:

I am creating a web app that needs login for users, and remembers the user throughout the app.

Once we have done that, then create a landing page once they successfully log in that shows them the temperature in the top 10 capital cities with a nice pictuer for each.

Display the users login name at the top of the page on the menu bar, and with an option on the menu bar for Current Time, Current Temparature.

Create a new page for Current Time....

....and so on. In other words, break your project into steps YOU understand and don't put fragmented thinking into the prompt, as you may prompt fragmented thinking in the AI response. Try out your own formats, using bullets, numbering or whatever suits you.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm REALLY impressed with Lovable and I strongly recommend it to both non-coders and advanced developers as a key productivity tool to go from idea (or enhacement of existing technologies) at a great pace.