$85,000 in tokens later: What I learned from scaling agentic coding at Lovable

Instead of employing an engineer for a year we burned an obscene amount of resources to generate code which will enable vibe coders to burn more resources.

But we’re lovable! Cute smile. Heart emoji.

- i swear to god it has been 3 years since LLMs came out

- i still have no idea what people are running for more than 5 mins

- if you are sitting and writing 20000 page requirement documents for your next project and having agentic AI agents create the whole damn project from scratch, you are doing it all wrong

- you ll end up eroding all your skills that translate requirements to code and worse you are dependent on these so called couple of frontier labs

- in about 5-10 years you are going to see absolutely horrible effects of this LLM stuff at scale when most engineers wont be able to write a script tag in html without an LLM

- mark my words

This article is very long with almost no content. Except "spending more tokens is good". Obviously the author got something to sell us.

> Reviewing AI-written code line-by-line isn't practical or a good use of anyone's time. And the usual answer to problems created by the use of AI is to use more AI, so you switch to AI reviews by default.

Ugh. Sure, for non-critical stuff that might be acceptable, but for anyone working on core banking or infrastructure PLEASE don't be doing this.

I think this article may have been a lot more insightful if it gave some insight into what product goals were achieved.

> During the first week of June I merged 293 PRs, and have found no production defects tracing back to those changes so far. The latter part is a bit of good luck — I think 2-3 minor and 1 major defect would be acceptable for this volume.

At this point, articles about LLMs paired with meaningless metrics have become a classic combo. I get that it's typical corporate BS, but publishing this widely is just weird. "Look, my productivity is skyrocketing according to a chart that only my manager cares about!"

Mitchell Hashimoto put it well: https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2071971627748020409

I had an idea for a video long time ago. The idea was to try building lovable using lovable and then building another lovable within that using it. They market to normal people as if anything is possible but its very disingenous to offer a no code platform with the type of marketing they do. They are not alone, selling people the dream of "just use this to make a million dollar app!" while they make money off them even if the app works out or not.

These platforms should do a revenue-share pricing where all these amazing apps created on the platform should only pay it if the app actually generates revenue if they really buy their marketing.

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I am not the author but Lovable tells me I'm in the top 10% of users. It's a great tool. Not affiliated in any way.