Following from my previous attempt at building a simple app to retrieve the ABN for a business, I figured I’d give lovable.dev a go. This will be a quick post to cover some of the likes/dislikes from this process.
Firstly I have to hand it to Lovable, they’ve done a great job with the user experience of the site. It’s really easy to get started, all from an initial prompt, and when you need things along the way (eg supabase) it’s always there to guide you – it’s like they’ve run this process a thousand times and have ironed out all the kinks.
I also loved that out of the box, the application that was created was simple, yet stylish, and overall worked even in the context of a mobile/desktop application.
I followed a similar process to my previous attempt, however I was a little more vague when it came to the webservice I wanted to call. At the prompt I entered “connect this to an abn lookup service available online”. I was totally blown away that it was able to find the correct service with it’s response being “I’ll help you connect the application to a real ABN lookup service. The Australian Business Register (ABR) provides a web API for looking up ABN details. To use it, we’ll need to register for an ABR GUID (authentication key).”
I was then prompted to enter the ABR GUID (which I have from previously requesting access to the service), connect to Supabase and approve changes to the database schema to store historical searches (all pretty cool stuff).
Ok, so this is where the wheels fell of the bus. Despite it’s best attempt, Lovable wasn’t able to call the service with any success. Furthermore, it actually made a number of changes to the app that actually broke it, or raised an error when calling the ABN lookup service. Each time, I was required to prompt Lovable to fix the issue…… surely the AI should be able to run the site, test it and then iterate until it works.
Unfortunately it was at this point that I ran out of my free prompts. To continue I had to sign up to one of the planes…. despite not having anything that resembles a working app.
I’m not at the point where I’m going to be spending money on these services, so I’ll wrap up the test drive of Lovable. I was quite impressed, so I suspect that AI should both get a point (for being quite proactive) and drop a point (for not being able to get the service calling working). If you’re keeping score:
Human Developers: 2 AI Code Builders: 1