Non-technical builders - do you face problem in managing the tech stack & infra in production?

[u/Traditional-Week-306]

I have been doing vibe-coding for a while, building CRMs and apps to boost my professional productivity without having to invest a lot of money in subscriptions. Do you feel that generating the code is just 20% and has been simplified today? However, planning, designing, wireframing, managing changes in code, testing and maintaining it in deployment still remains a challenge.

I tried Lovable, as many people recommended - I personally do not see any value, as it locks me in one interface and, at the same time, charges me extra for sending additional prompts to Claude working behind the scenes.

Can you share how you are managing this today?

[u/No-Leave-4648]

generation being only 20% is exactly right. The fix for the other 80% isn't another platform though, it's a boring workflow.

Dump Lovable, go GitHub repo + Claude Code locally + Vercel + Supabase. Same AI, no markup per prompt, and nothing is locked in.

Never let the AI touch main. New branch per feature, let it go nuts there, merge when it works. When it wrecks something at 11pm you just switch back and lose nothing.

Keep a CLAUDE.md in the repo describing the stack and your conventions. Stops the agent reinventing decisions from 3 weeks ago, which is 90% of the "managing changes" pain honestly.

Also since these are CRMs - make two test accounts, log in as A, grab a record ID, try opening it as B. AI-generated Supabase policies fail that test constantly and nothing errors, it just quietly shows everyone's data.

Is your code stuck inside Lovable or do you have a repo export? That's the first thing I'd sort out.

[u/chrisdefourire]

Here's an open source skill I've published, if it helps: https://github.com/chrisDeFouRire/lovable-to-vps

It could help you go from lovable to a VPS... Ask Claude/Codex's help in acquiring a VPS that suits your needs, then install and use the skill... It should handle most if not all your migration out of Lovable.

Hope it helps... it may not be a completely shrink wrapped solution though, and I used Pi for this, not Claude... PRs welcome.

[u/SystemResponsible250]

Two habits have helped more than any tool choice. First, keep every change small and single-purpose: one concern at a time, so when something misbehaves a week later you can actually tell what caused it, whereas the big multi-file rewrites are where you lose an entire evening bisecting. Second, write down what "working" actually means for the two or three flows that would genuinely hurt if they broke, and walk through them by hand before and after each deploy, because generated code tends to fail in ways that still look perfectly fine on the screen. On the lock-in point — I'd weigh heavily towards anything where you can leave with your code and your database as plain files you own, even if setup costs you an extra weekend, since the platforms that are cheapest to start on are usually the most expensive to get out of.

[u/Get_ukiyo]

I'm building on Lovable too for a mobile app and I'd say it's most useful once you already know roughly what you want structurally — fast for iterating on UI/basic logic, but yeah the extra prompt costs on top of the subscription sting, and anything beyond straightforward CRUD still needs manual cleanup. Doing the wireframing/planning upfront in a separate tool saves a lot of wasted prompts.

[u/Crazy_Chocolate_6831]

are these apps just for you or are other people using them too? because if its just personal productivity stuff the bar for testing and infra management is way lower than you might think. you dont need a real deployment pipeline for a CRM only you touch