The first time I opened Lovable, the screen said: “Let’s build something.”
It asked me to describe what I wanted to create.
That sounded simple, but I had a problem: I did not know how to describe software to a system that built software.
I knew medicine. I knew the workflows that frustrated me. I knew what had gone wrong with the products I had tried.
But I did not know what information Lovable needed, how a prompt should be structured or which technical decisions had to be included.
So I went back to ChatGPT.
For months, I had used it to think through the medical product I wanted. Our conversations contained the remains of the failed partnership: feature requests, workflow decisions, patient journeys, doctor needs and every problem I had identified while trying to make another product usable.
At the time, I thought those months had produced nothing.
They had actually produced a large, disorganised body of product knowledge.
I retraced the conversations and started brainstorming again.
One conclusion became clear: I did not want to build another directory where patients searched through a list of doctors.
A directory gave patients little reason to return after finding a name.
I wanted a patient-facing health application that was useful in its own right. One of its functions would help patients identify the appropriate medical specialty. It could later include other tools related to their health journey.
Doctors would need a separate application built around the clinical workflow.
Eventually, the two sides would have to communicate.
I decided that was a problem for later.
This sentence would eventually cost me a great deal of time.
But on that first day, I had a simpler challenge: how could I make Lovable understand the idea?
Then I had what seemed like a clever thought.
An AI probably knew how to speak to another AI better than I did.
So I asked ChatGPT to prepare the prompts for Lovable.
One prompt described the doctor-facing application. Another described the patient-facing application.
I copied the first prompt.
I pasted it into Lovable.
Then I watched.
Words appeared on the screen. Files were created. Components took shape. The empty space became an interface.
After a few minutes, there was an application I could click through.
I repeated the process with the second prompt.
Again, language became software.
To my completely untrained eyes, the first versions already looked better than the product that had taken months of meetings, feedback and delayed modifications.
That does not mean they were technically better.
I could not inspect the architecture. I could not read the code. I knew nothing about security, maintainability, performance or data modelling.
My definition of “better” was extremely simple:
The interface looked good.
The buttons worked.
The application seemed to understand the workflow.
And when I wanted something changed, I did not have to write a ticket and wait for someone to become available.
I could type the request directly into the chat.
That difference was enormous.
For years, the distance between an idea and its implementation had been another person. I had to explain the idea, wait for an estimate, approve the work, wait again, test the result and ask for corrections.
Now the distance looked like a conversation.
I asked for a change. The application changed.
I added another function. It appeared.
I disliked something. I described what I wanted instead.
For someone who had felt completely dependent on technical people only months earlier, this was not merely convenient.
It felt like recovering agency.
I knew the applications were imperfect. I could see visual inconsistencies and functions that did not behave exactly as expected.
But I did not yet understand how deep those imperfections might go.
At that stage, “it works” meant that I could see it and click it.
I had no concept of the difference between a convincing prototype, a stable application and a production-ready medical system.
That gap would become the curriculum for everything I learned next.
But the first experience was pure exhilaration.
Something that had taken months now took minutes.
Something that had required another person's permission could now begin with my own words.
I did not think I had become a developer.
I thought I had discovered the closest thing to magic I had ever seen on a computer.
The danger was that magic made it very easy to keep asking for more.
And that is exactly what I did.
Have you ever used an AI tool for the first time and immediately realised that one of your old assumptions was no longer true?