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

https://lovable.dev/blog/85000-in-tokens-later-scaling-agentic-coding-at-lovable

by aliclark • 18 days ago

21 32 18 days ago

aliclark• 18 days ago

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.

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.

alunchbox• 18 days ago

It depends I imagine. Core bankend bank system, database, transactions and such sure, but what about the web and mobile client? I'm down to get better customer experience if they can ship faster without breaking the bank.

What about fraud detection and prevention? I hope to think I'm not alone in that perspective that it's acceptable in those cases.

hoppp• 18 days ago

Its fine for web and mobile as long as you can't get sued if data leaks or you get hacked.

justinclift5• 18 days ago

What about fraud detection and prevention?

It's easy to see both pros and cons of that. I guess, like most stuff, it depends upon the appetite for risk vs the downsides of false positives/negatives and incorrect analysis.

fragmede• 18 days ago

Fraud detection and prevention have been using AI to determine things long before ChatGPT came on the scene. Of course, they call it machine learning, but it's all linear algebra under the hood. Just that ChatGPT has a really big hood.

altmanaltman3• 18 days ago

For critical stuff, there is already a ton of regulations in place that prevent this kind of thing from happening. Why do people think programmers working in such industries have no oversight and can ship whatever they want and however they want? It simply doesn't work that way in those industries.

justinclift5• 18 days ago

Why do people think programmers working in such industries have no oversight and can ship whatever they want and however they want?

I've worked in those industries, and there's a large gap between the theory of what you're saying vs the practical reality when the CxO suite are pushing AI on everyone. :(

willtemperley• 18 days ago

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.

nylonstrung2• 18 days ago

50M projects built on Lovable and somehow I've never seen any of them

realusername• 18 days ago

Because these things do not scale beyond a landing page, it's the modern Frontpage

StrLght• 18 days ago

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

tangenter• 18 days ago

“Spotify ships 4,500 production deploys a day” LMAO

altmanaltman3• 18 days ago

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.

gershy• 18 days ago

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

tempodox2• 17 days ago

You’d have to ask the agent, but it looks like they didn’t prompt for that.

vivzkestrel• 18 days ago

- 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

siren2026• 18 days ago

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

sevenseacat• 18 days ago

They went from 20-30 merged PRs a week to 150! What's in them? Who knows, no-one has read any of them

paradox242• 18 days ago

What was the end result of all of this exactly? Seems like 85k and all you have is a masturbatory blog post.

ImPostingOnHN• 18 days ago

Human review is an exception

I see quite a few bloggers saying this. Not super surprising coming from a vibe coding company trying to encourage vibe coding. The problem with applying this in other companies is that human review by the vibe coder is the exception. It still gets human reviewed, just by a tired human who is jaded at daily getting numerous 20 page PR review requests with 20 distinct unrelated changes because the "author" figured as long as they're making a change with AI they might as well say yes to every suggested follow-on prompt and as long as they're making a PR why not include all these changes in it and the code is moved all around for no reason and every line shows changes because of formatting changes so we'll have to add more rules to the linter now which we never needed before and the functions are renamed and reimplemented and replaced and removed because of course it's just better that way and the documentation is full of wrong assumptions and emojis and oh god the comments have emojis too and it's ok they can implement those fixes just give them a moment so they can add another commit to the 20 fix commits in the PR and the commit they push doesn't have anything to do with the thing it's supposed to fix did they even look at this ok just talk to them and oh they've been away on chat for hours and oh they're an innovator look at all those commits made and PRs opened and oh geez if those old geezers would stop holding up the PRs with slow human brains and being blockers maybe they'd be the ones getting the promotions and the fast-tracks and the innovator awards

nylonstrung2• 18 days ago

When I go to a "dev tools" site and landing page is just a prompt that's when I reach for my revolver

esailija• 18 days ago

If you don't human review anything and no human reads the codebase guess what I could do hundreds of PRs in an hour and appear the most productive while not doing any real work at all. These kind of idiotic companies sound like great places to work for as overemployed .

NewsaHackO• 18 days ago

I wonder how much he burned on this article.

Stitch4223• 18 days ago

Let’s screw some numbers to make your Codex subscription look as impressive.

By spending on the $200 plan, you get 20x the amount of tokens. So effectively $4,000 if you’d buy it at the worst way possible. Now do so for a year: $48,000 on tokens.

To reach the conclusion of the article, you could just also have used the free tier.

“Was it worth it? My current productivity is simply beyond the reach of old unassisted development techniques. I feel there's no going back in that sense.”

Money spent versus value gained seems pretty low.

tempodox2• 17 days ago

Was that an education that was worth $85k?

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

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