Developing with AI: I Paid to Find Out (And It Cost Several Dollars!)
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My experience using the AI platforms Bolt.new and Lovable.dev for a CRUD project, detailing the challenges, costs, and lessons learned in the process.
My 13-hour and 60-dollar journey trying to create a simple app with AI.
I decided to put two AI dev platforms (Bolt.new and Lovable.dev) to the test in a challenge that seemed simple: creating an app with login and a basic client and company CRUD.
Spoiler: it was not simple at all.
Round 1: Bolt.new The platform is impressive at first, but I found myself spending millions of tokens on a basic task: creating an edit form. After much struggle, I succeeded. The final blow was the Supabase integration, which broke the entire project. Result: 40 dollars, many hours, and an unusable system.
Round 2: Lovable.dev A pleasant surprise. With a brilliant element selection tool, I redid in 3 hours what took me 10h in Bolt. I was optimistic, until I got to the Supabase integration. The same errors, the same login failures. Result: another 20 dollars and the same frustration.
Final Thoughts The lesson learned is that these tools still stumble badly on integrations with external databases.
My hypothesis is that it might have been my fault for leaving the Supabase integration for the end. If I had started with it, maybe the AI would have built the CRUD logic more assertively.
I am almost tempted to run the experiment again with this approach.
What do you think? Has anyone had success integrating these platforms with an external database?
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