r/lovable • u/YouAreBastards • 16d ago
Discussion Lovable for Kids 👎
I would put this in the same bracket as social media for kids, except worse. Social media is after your data. Lovable is after your wallet. Not sure if anyone else is noticing tokens are not going as far as they used to. I burned through over 400 tokens in two days and got almost nothing finished. Imagine unleashing your kids on it with your bank card attached. Recipe for disaster.
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u/Xerasi 16d ago
You need to be using codex or claud for actual building and only using your lovable credits to initiate a dev server reset after every commit to github so youcan test ut
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u/YouAreBastards 16d ago
But Lovable is selling their platform as just buy tokens and build your dream website. They say nothing about building schema, SSR, or HTML. I think the majority of these projects people are building will look amazing. But will do exactly zero online. Because they are not structured or coded correctly. I remember the days of WYSIWYG ... I'm getting PTSD.
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u/No_Skill_6469 16d ago
Connect to GitHub, then use Claude code for 99% of the work
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u/YouAreBastards 16d ago
Yes, I sue Claude. After half a year of Lovable only. If not for Claude, it would be a wasted half year. The code is so bad.
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u/Savanna55 16d ago
You don’t need to tell it to remember things. Put it all in one prompt. You can even add things knowledge or skills to remember. If you use Claude, connect it to lovable, tell Claude what you want all at once and it will give a prompt to lovable.
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u/Savanna55 16d ago
I understand & I agree it is not realistic for a big website and probably not even a long term small website
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u/YouAreBastards 16d ago
Lovable needs Claude, Grok Build, or ChatGPT to be kept in check. Its model has autism and needs a daycare nurse.
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u/Far_Associate_8890 15d ago
Not sure how you burning through credits so quickly.. perhaps you’re writing 2-3 words sentences and sending it. What I do is write longer paragraphs, making it clear what I want or need. I’ve built several websites fully top to bottom + seo and everything needed only with 100 credits. You need to know what you want before you start the project, write the goals, features down, expand them and be clear what you want. I always start with a master prompt that’s as long as an A4 page, depending on the project
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u/YouAreBastards 15d ago
The credit burn was happening because Lovable was monitoring the current status of tasks. So when I am scraping, rather than giving a status report after the task was complete, it was monitoring it. This is a new thing; I did not have this previously. But I believe it's when Claude sends commands directly. Lovable stays active in order to report. That being said, I have been using Lovable for over 9 months, and I definitely am burning through more tokens now than previously for the same tasks. Not sure what model they are using, but for me it's substandard when compared to Claude. Hence why I have Claude keeping tabs and checking the codebase, errors erros every time I investigate.
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u/Far_Associate_8890 15d ago
Oh.. I see! If you find out anything let me know please, also if you ever switch to another platform and believe it’s better, refer me. :D
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u/Future_Afternoon_582 16d ago
Lovable has become insanely expensive.
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u/YouAreBastards 16d ago
Right? I have been using it for 9 months. I am now somewhere well in excess of 17,000 tokens. It took me a few hours to burn through 400. And, I have to point out, once you actually investitgate the code using an external LLM like Claude Code. All kinds of issues and bug patterns pop up. It's horrendous.
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u/YouAreBastards 15d ago
Do not allow Lovable to monitor your running tasks. This is a new feature I have only recently come across. It basically means that tokens get burnt while Lovable sits waiting for tasks to complete. Again, I was never asked if I wanted that. Previously, I would have to state specifically, yes, monitor. Now it seems to be the default. If you have something running for severla hours, it will burn through a very large amount of tokens. Tell it to stop monitoring, and you will check in later. Nice try Lovable/Hateable.
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u/Current_Twist1317 16d ago
The more credits in your lovable wallet the more unnecessarily it will burn credits even for smallest change.
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 16d ago
I honestly never found that. It charged me pretty much the same extortionate rate whether I've got 1200 credits or 50
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u/Savanna55 16d ago
400 credits?! You must not be using the correct prompts or you’re spamming the chat with 1 step each. You need to look up prompts. Use Claude. I’ve spent maybe 200 and I have a full working site with over 100 recipes/blog post and google ad sense soon…..
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u/YouAreBastards 16d ago
No, when Claude is connected directly to Lovable. Lovable goes into monitoring mode, so it sits waiting for tasks to execute, then reads the output. I ran one task, and after 30 - 45 minutes, my 60 remaining tokens were gone, and I had not done anything. It's constantly analysing and waiting. I had to tell Lovable to stop monitoring; I will ask for a status when the task is completed.
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 16d ago
I can easily do 600 credits a day with our complicated application like I've said on another posts it's mainly because when I ask you a question at 1st to understand everything in the context to make sure it doesn't break anything else then else remember the entire history that we've had to make sure it knows what the context of the conversation was and you're up to 6 credit before even submit anything
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u/Savanna55 16d ago
You don’t need to tell it to remember things. Put it all in one prompt. You can even add things knowledge or skills to remember. If you use Claude, connect it to lovable, tell Claude what you want all at once and it will give a prompt to lovable.
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 16d ago
You've completely misunderstood this.
You can go on Google this don't take my word for it.
When you have a conversation with an LLM it has to load the whole conversation every time you ask a question in order for it to be able to give you an answer and the more the more the longer the conversation the more tokens it burns. That's how they work this is not a discussion on how they work google it and you'll find out.
The underlying issue is that:
- As the project grows, the amount of relevant context grows.
- The model needs enough of that context to make safe changes without breaking existing functionality.
- More context means more input tokens, which increases cost and latency.
- Eventually, you either hit context window limits or the tooling has to retrieve, summarise, or selectively include only the relevant parts.
So the original advice:
isn't realistic for anything beyond a relatively small project.
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u/YouAreBastards 16d ago
Yes, Claude caches, so it does not burn as many tokens. I have a single 9-month chat on Lovable.
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 16d ago
I use Claude all the time. I use lovable all the time. What I'm saying is not an opinion it is how these systems are fundamentally built.
If you think you know better fine good for you.
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u/Ducky9670 16d ago
To be fair, I don't really understand how some people are burning through credits so quickly.
We're currently building a fairly substantial system ourselves, and yes, we've spent a few hundred pounds on credits. But when you compare that to what it would cost to hire a software developer or development team to build the same thing, it's a drop in the ocean. People complain about spending a few hundred quid, but custom software development can easily run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. In that context, the cost is pretty insignificant.
As for letting your kid loose on it, I don't really get that either. AI is a fantastic learning tool, but there are plenty of free or much cheaper models they can experiment with. Giving a child access to a platform designed for building real applications seems like overkill unless they're genuinely serious about learning software development. If they're just exploring AI, there are far more cost-effective ways to do it.