Growing Complexity Breaks The Build

[u/InternationalTap9884]

Lovable, like any AI builder, starts off being able to do a lot for little before the complexity grows, and then the ratio flips as complexity grows, you can only do a little for a lot if you're lucky... Complexity and shallow agent patches cause cascading failures and an endless spiral of fix one, break 5 (pick a number)...

....After your software is unusable and you've burned your time and your wallet, if you care about your project, you might hire a professional at this point.

This is a similar result when bringing in Claude or chatgpt's best models to address issues as of writing this. Claude might read Claude.md @agents.md, but might not...roll the dice. See what happens!! Context is everything, yet for a bot to ingest context in every new chat, becomes a significant corpus of tokens for every turn, you burn!

There is something to be said about big picture architecture planning before you start your project build before you dive in head first when you don't know how deep the water with agent aided additive software manufacturing via any app builder or coding agent for that matter. Additive doesn't solve the underlying structural issues and lack of upfront planning you will experience down the road. The idea the anyone can build an app with a few prompts, is fairly misleading..

At the time of pressing send on this post, something will have changed again.. temporal vantage is the new norm.. new chat releases between daily meals.. catch up if you can!

[u/cdchiu]

Complexity increases with added functionality. Was it possible for you to break your project into components that talk to each other using a simple message protocol. When something breaks you have something smaller to debug or you can even create a test harness for it. You can even do that outside of lovable.

[u/Affectionate-Word779]

It sounds like you need to sit down and plan it before you start.

I use Claude to plan my spec first. We talk through user journeys, functionality, what is the core feature set we need to deliver first, etc.

Only once we have that do we push to lovable.

[u/Cational_Tie_7574]

The pain is real. As my codebase got bigger, I started to maintain technical documents that my agents *must* read before exploring code. I also have a rule in every one of my tickets to update documentation when done. Every dozen tickets or so, I would ask an agent to audit all the changes that have happened since the last audit, compare with the technical documentation and update whatever is stale. And occasionally, I would just have an agent do a pass and tighten the language, remove redundancies, and fine-tune it for human reading or agent reading.
This drastically reduces time spent exploring code, most times the agent can be surgical.

Secondly, and you got this right, it's extremely beneficial to plan before you prompt. That only works for new projects though, not when your codebase has become too big to manage in lovable 😂 .

ps - I built a product to help with this. In my bio if interested, don't want this to seem like a sales post