The vibe coding landscape has exploded. Lovable and Dev (formerly v0.dev) represent two approaches to AI-powered application building — and neither is what most engineering teams actually need.
What They Do
Lovable generates full-stack applications from natural language descriptions. You describe what you want, it builds a React + Supabase app. Good for prototyping. Questionable for production.
Dev (Vercel) takes a more focused approach — generating UI components from descriptions and screenshots. Tighter scope, higher quality output within that scope.
Both are tools for creating applications. Neither helps you understand existing ones.
The Migration Problem
Here is where it gets interesting. Teams that built prototypes in Lovable or Dev eventually need to:
- Move to a real codebase with proper architecture
- Integrate with existing systems
- Add the features these tools cannot generate
- Maintain and debug code they did not write
This migration is where the Understanding Tax hits hardest. You have AI-generated code that no one on your team wrote, no one understands the patterns of, and no documentation explains.
When Each Tool Makes Sense
Use Lovable when:
- You need a working prototype in hours, not weeks
- The application is simple enough to not need custom architecture
- You are validating an idea before investing engineering time
Use Dev when:
- You need high-quality UI components quickly
- You are already in the Vercel/Next.js ecosystem
- You want AI-assisted component design, not full app generation
Use neither when:
- You have an existing codebase that needs enhancement
- Your application has complex business logic
- You need to understand dependencies and feature boundaries
- You are working on a team where multiple developers touch the same code
The Gap
The missing tool in this landscape is not another code generator. It is a code understander.
When your team inherits a Lovable-generated codebase and needs to extend it, the first question is not "how do I write more code?" — it is "what did this AI build, how is it structured, and what breaks if I change this function?"
That is the pre-code intelligence gap. And that is what Glue solves.
Originally published on glue.tools. Glue is the pre-code intelligence platform — paste a ticket, get a battle plan.
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