I’ve had an idea kicking around the back of my head for a few months now, and last night I finally fired up Lovable and fed in a prompt. Holy geez it is so much fun!

I know I’m not the first person to discover it, but it is really something else to see a loose idea materialize on screen. In my case I started out with a pretty basic “turn my spreadsheet into an app” prompt, and out came a fully-formed app: Google SSO, mobile-friendliness, a ferreals database, pop-up calendar widgets. Not too shabby, Lovable gang!

Probably the most compelling feature in Lovable is the “Publish” button: after a tiny bit of prompting and playing around, is this thing really ready for prime time? That can’t be right, can it?

In my case I’ve decided “not yet,” and I figured out how to export my Lovable-generated code into Github* so I can edit it directly. (Took a minute to find this feature! If you’re looking for it, just append “/settings/git” to the URL for your project’s home screen, so your final URL is something like https://lovable.dev/projects/{your-project-uuid}/settings/git) The sync experience is quite nice: changes from Github appear in your Lovable preview environment within minutes.

My plan is to fool around with this project a bit over the next few weeks. The lens I apply to side-projects is “what more can I learn?” That itself is an interesting question!

There are all sorts of feature tweaks and data model changes I can make - either by hand, or by Lovable credits, or perhaps even by my software printing press. No doubt I could learn a thing or two that way.

I’m also interested to learn all the other stuff that goes into launching a successful product, beyond the boundaries of the code: marketing, pricing, and so on. That’s decidedly outside my comfort zone, and I confess to feeling quite daunted by it. That’s a pretty good signal that I should dive into it!