I heard that Claude Code is an amazing tool, but for 2 months it took me behind. Imagine that you used to work with only one co-founder, and now you have to orchestrate the whole team and make sure nothing is missing. That’s how Claude Code feels when switching from Lovable.
What makes Lovable great
Lovable is probably the easiest way to code an app. For example, someone like me, who doesn’t even have programming skills and sees problems from the user perspective, could just make workable software by telling Lovable what I want to get.
And that’s the main advantage of Lovable. You don’t need to take care of everything that is behind the code — like the database, hosting, deployments and repositories. You just have a chat on one side, and the result of your prompt in front of you. Lovable shows the results of its work in minutes, so you can share it with your colleagues to get early feedback, and your app will be fully usable even without publishing it for a wider audience.
You can even draw a sketch of how you want your app to look, and Lovable can get you there. It all feels like you have your buddy programmer sitting next to you.
When Lovable hits its limits
But Lovable has its own limits. For me this limit was making the mobile app. I found a very fast way to make a fully working mobile app that I used to show to my friends, using PWA technology (which is basically just a website that can be installed on a phone or computer). But I knew that to get more people using the app, I would need it to be in the App Store and Google Play. So I switched to Claude Code.
That same day, I understood it doesn’t work like Lovable at all. It doesn’t have the beautiful preview mode, it has a separate code repository and database. So I had to set up Vercel, GitHub, and Supabase — the good thing is all of them have free tiers.
So I kept using Claude Code in the browser, as I did with Lovable. But it sucked. My workflow got much slower something that took 2 minutes before, started to take 10-20 minutes, as I needed to not only write prompts, but also tweak Vercel, GitHub and Supabase. So instead of being a PM who can just type the problem and wait for the resolution, I had to take the Technical Lead role to merge PRs, manage deployments and run DB changes.
Another issue was the usage limits. I used Opus — the most capable Claude model — for coding, and it hit usage limits constantly. So my first 2 months with Claude Code were a disappointment and frustration.
The moment things changed
I was prepared to deal with this workflow and reach out to someone who could help me set up the programming workflow. But accidentally I saw a video of the new Cowork feature, which only worked in Claude Desktop. So I downloaded the Claude Desktop app and tried to use Claude Code there. Apparently, Claude could use Terminal commands to take care of merging PRs, so with the permissions set up the Git/Vercel problem was gone. I also tried using the smaller Sonnet model instead of Opus, and it worked faster and I think even better for my setup. As an added bonus I could do more before hitting limits.
And when I was happy with how everything worked, I started to run a few streams of work simultaneously, so I got this feeling of orchestrating a team rather than doing everything myself. And so far, I’m happy with this approach.
So which one should you use?
I’m still a big fan of Lovable. I think it’s a great tool when you’re starting with an idea and need to draw something up really fast — for example if you’re sitting in a product meeting, or in a hackathon. I would still pair it with a UX tool like Figma Make, or just a pen and paper sketch.
However, if you’re already happy with the prototype and want to make a production-ready app, I would go with Claude Code. It can tackle problems from more angles — like creating a mobile app and adding a unit test suite. But to make it work, you would need to spend some time setting everything up.
So think about what stage you’re at now — are you in the early startup phase when you need to quickly make something, or do you already have the prototype and just need to make the final bits before making your software public?
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