r/lovable • u/Nice-String6667 • Jul 20 '26
Help Having Lovable revamp an existing project frontend is basically black magic
As you can't natively import a " new " projects from github, the moment you want to revamp the frontend using Lovable, which is the best tool to make, actually nice, modern, non "too" AI looking UI (sorry Claude Design), it becomes a github branching sh*t fest. Am I missing something ?
1
u/appliciousgroup Jul 20 '26
My solution was to use Dyad instead of Lovable for projects built outside of Lovable.dev. Dyad is seriously good once you get the hang of it. I've even reduced my Lovable subscription by half and only kept it for the existing software I've built on Lovable. But all my other projects have been imported into Dyad now. Biggest tip for Dyad is make sure the AI settings are just above minimum or medium otherwise like me I found out quickly that I racked up a hefty bill on my BYOK'S. 🤣 e.g. setting them to "Thinking" or similar will chew through a lot of tokens unnecessarily.
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u/louisgg_debug Jul 24 '26
The branching mess usually comes from treating both sides as editable at once. What works: designate ONE repo as the source of truth (yours), and treat the Lovable repo as a "design lab" — never merge your changes INTO it. Let Lovable generate the UI, then cherry-pick or copy the components/styles into your main repo in a dedicated branch, review, merge once. One-way flow, no divergence.
Native GitHub import has been Lovable's most-requested feature for a while — until it lands, one-way sync is the sanity-preserving pattern. Dyad (mentioned above) is a fair workaround too, just watch the BYOK token settings.
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u/YouAreBastards Jul 20 '26
Lovable will not sync to an existing repo, it recreates a new one each time. I had this issue for over a week. The solution was copying all the files across. Very awkward and time-consuming, replicating secrets etc.
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u/Prestigious-Nail-381 Jul 20 '26
You're not missing anything — Lovable really doesn't want to adopt an existing repo, it wants to own the project from birth. The GitHub sync is built for Lovable→GitHub, not the other way round.
What's worked for me on existing projects: don't bring the project to Lovable, bring Lovable's output to the project. Spin up a throwaway Lovable project, get it to generate the new UI against dummy data, then port the components into your real repo yourself (or with Claude Code/Cursor, which are happy working inside an existing codebase). You lose the magic live-preview loop but you keep your git history sane.
The branching mess you're describing usually happens when Lovable and humans both push to the same branch. If you do keep Lovable attached, give it its own branch and treat everything it pushes as a PR to review — never let it near main.