My 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.

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.

Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project