I vibe-coded a dog birthday app. We still need developers. – Computerworld

The app was orange on black, which was kind of dog-themed, I guess. I didn’t like the way the date picker worked, so I told it to fix it. I didn’t like the way the dog size buttons worked, so I had the AI fix that, too, and made other minor design changes.

How long did this whole process take? As long as it took me to take all the screenshots and write this description of what I was doing. Plus five minutes each time I published it to the web.

So maybe half an hour altogether to get the basic app up and running, plus the time it took to take notes for this article, grab screenshots, and have lunch.

But then I went back and tried adding in functionality where the user logs in and saves information about their dog — but I couldn’t get the authentication to work. I tried to switch to just a login and password, but couldn’t get that to work either. I also tried to get social sharing buttons working, which was the whole point of publishing the app to the web, and those didn’t work either. I spent an afternoon going back and forth on this. It was very frustrating.

I’m pretty sure that this is something that a real developer could have handled in seconds. But for a non-developer like me, I was looking at a weekend of trying different things until I found something that worked.

So finally I asked Firebase Studio to rip out all the non-functional features involving user logins, saving doggieprofiles, and social sharing, and was left with the very simple doggie birthday calculator app that I started with — exactly like the one I found on my phone’s app store.

Yup, there’s already an app for that. Maybe I’m not the supreme genius I thought I was.

Still, this is a functional app. I could embed it into my company website to give my visitors a cute little doggie birthday calculator to use, if I had a company website.

Vibe coding with Lovable

Then I moved on to Lovable.

I pasted in the app description that I got from Claude, the same one I used for Firebase Studio. It produced an app almost immediately, but it just told me how old the dog was, without calculating its next birthday. That’s the same thing Firebase Studio did. Maybe I should have read through Claude’s app description instead of blindly trusting it. Ah, who’s got time for that?

I asked for a fix. Now Lovable gave me an app that said that my dog’s next birthday would be several years in the past. That’s no good — I’ve already missed it.

It apologized and reworked the logic.

Then I published the app. No billing information required. And it did not take even five minutes. It took less time than it took me to type this paragraph.

Instant publishing, no waiting. Extremely pretty design. All the functionality I asked for. Even the URL looks neater and cleaner than the Firebase Studio one.

Yes, it just took a couple of minutes to get the basic app up.

But it was still missing the ability to log in, save profiles of multiple dogs, and other back-end functionality. Did I dare?

I dared.

First, Lovable told me it needed to connect to Supabase, and provided a button for me to click that took me right to where I had to go. I had an option to continue with GitHub or with SSO. I must have created a GitHub account at some point in the past, because I was able to log in. I picked the free Supabase plan, authorized access, and went back to the Lovable tab.

And then I bumped into my first major obstacle. I ran out of the free daily Lovable credits. I could have put a pin in it and returned the next day, but I was on a roll, so I paid $25 for the upgrade. That’s $25 a month, so I need to remember to downgrade back to free once I’m done building this app.

Adding Google and Facebook logins required some authentication steps that I couldn’t figure out how to do at first glance, so I abandoned that idea and just had it use a login and password. And Lovable built it for me.

The login even included a confirmation email so I could confirm that I wanted to create an account on my new website. I didn’t ask for that bit of functionality — the AI thought of it on its own and just did it. And it built social sharing buttons. And I could save profiles of multiple dogs.

There was a little back-and-forth as I refined my design and the functionality, but mostly I just went with what it gave me.

Just take a look at the final result: the logo, the sign-in button at the top, the color scheme. It did all of that.

It even let me add multiple dogs so I could keep track of all their birthdays.

You can try out my app here: https://paw-ty-time-calculator.lovable.app

In the end, I wound up using 14 out of my 100 monthly credits. Prorating my $25, I spent half an hour and $3.50 to build the app. Or, at five free credits a day, I could have done it for free over three days. Which reminds me: I have to go and downgrade back to the free plan before I start racking up monthly bills.

Downgrading means that all my apps will be public and have the Lovable logo on them, and I won’t be able to have custom domains.

My verdict? If you want to build apps that run on a custom domain, get the $25 plan, but for people just futzing around, the free plan is good enough.

Am I now going to become a full-time vibe coder? No. But if I have another idea for an app, well, I might just go and build it.

Reality check: vibe coding at work

What about that hypothetical ‘average business user’? As the two platforms I tested currently stand, nontechnical business users can build a simple app with Firebase Studio as long as it doesn’t require creating user accounts or interfacing with other systems. They can build an app with Lovable that looks nicer, goes up faster, and has an email-based login system and social sharing. And it’s possible to do all this on the free plans.

But for anything involving interactions with other platforms, such as authentications or data access, they’ll need IT help. And they’ll likely need IT help if the app breaks at some point down the road.

Hristo Borisov, CEO at Payhawk, a spending management firm, says his company is all-in on vibe coding — and they’ve already replaced some commercial software with new vibe-coded apps.

“Instead of buying a $70,000-a-year performance management system, we built it from scratch,” he says, calling the software “bespoke, exactly for what we need.”

Payhawk still had developers write the app in Lovable, he says, under the direction of someone from the business side. But the entire app took two people a week to build — without any coding — and adding a new feature takes just a day.

Factoring in salaries and Lovable costs, it took about $4,000 total, he says, for a custom-made product instead of off-the-shelf software that didn’t quite do what the company needed.

Payhawk hosts the app itself, since it already has the infrastructure and skill set to do so. And because it was a complex project, it required developers, not just business users, to design and build it.

“Keep in mind that you’re generating a function for a product that has many features, different roles, different permissions, different views, and integrations to many internal systems,” he says. “So, it’s good to have some supervision of what the end result is.”

Other apps in use at Payhawk have been written completely by non-engineers, he says, for simpler, non-business-critical functions. When apps require access to sensitive data, IT does have to be involved to ensure that everything is safe and secure, he says.

Gene Kim, the author of a book on vibe coding — Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond, scheduled to be released in October — says that there are two major use cases for vibe coding.

Developers can use it to reduce the time it takes to code projects from months to days, to quickly prototype applications and designs, and to maintain and improve existing applications.

Non-developers can create simple tools for themselves to use and other low-risk applications, or to create prototypes that they can show to developers to explain what they want to have built.

“The notion that businesspeople can totally write apps for themselves without developers — I think that’s going to be further away,” he says.

Even if the AI can do it, human judgment is still required for more complicated projects, he says. “How do you make it mission-critical? How do you make it resilient, secure, and so forth? That’s where you need professional developers to come in and help if you want to trust that thing. That’s where you need someone who’s done it before.”