alt Hacker NewsMy friend built his niche news site with lovable. He used Wordpress as a headless CMS, and lovable built some absolute monstrosity with cloudflare workers - every page view incurred a call to Wordpress, no proper caching and it was slow as hell. It was just Wordpress but with 10 extra layers. 3+ second TTFB.
He didn’t have the technical skills to know why it was a monstrosity, or how to prompt his way out of it.
For him a static site was a better choice, but apparently lovable will only use their own framework called “Tanstack Start”? You can’t get it to build you an AstroJS site.
I got him to switch to Cursor and he rebuilt the whole site with Astro and cloudflare pages in a couple of days. It’s now blazing fast.
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Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
I use Claude Code the way others use Lovable. I'm comfortable with the terminal and Claude Code but I think Anthropic (et al.) is closing the gap rapidly. And Claude Code + Claude Design is way more capable than what I think Lovable is.
I assume Lovable had to build around constraints to reach non-technical people at the time. But the models and tooling have improved such that those constraints are melting away. I'm not sure what advantage Lovable has in the long run.