Is Lovable getting monetization wrong?

These apps will look dated in a few years, don’t waste your time. You’re just having fun playing around making old shit that could have made you a lot of money 10 years ago but is now just a weekend project. That’s the way things go in tech. Starry-eyed dreamers will let their imagination run wild, but they’re the laggards, the industry is already thinking ahead.

The next generation of apps isn’t going to look like the previous gen. No beautiful UIs and fancy CSS. No UI at all.

Instead, everyone will have some kind of platform like Cursor, but instead of just coding, it’s for everything.

Subscribing to new services for your AI to use will be the equivalent of downloading apps from an AppStore to your phone.

Then you can just say things like “fuck this person! AI, give me an OSINT profile of this Redditor!” and since your AI has the osint app it compiles the info instantly and says “here, damn”. No need to open an app, just straight info into your brain as quickly as possible.

AI has clearly made us tired of googling endlessly for info on random websites, so why are we still opening up apps to do various tasks? Because we want to see pretty interfaces? Get real. It’s time for the UNIX philosophy to go mainstream. Start thinking of how your product can minimize time to satisfaction, graphical interfaces get in the way of satisfaction.

The only problem is we currently don’t have a single unifying platform like an iPhone or something to consolidate a user base, but it will come. Start planning for that day so you can launch new services on day 1. It will be a gold rush.

And in the end, a lot of people will find they will struggle with coming up with good AI app ideas, because 80% of their idea was just putting a pretty interface in front of something complex. That’s how you know it was mostly a bad idea.

With that mindset you’d have skipped getting a PC in the 90s because the Internet in your pocket is gonna happen any day now.

For example let’s say the agent you describe can relieve people of manual data extraction from websites. Such an agent would be sheer utter magic for a friend of mine. Part of their role involves logging in to get data on employees from 4-5 different systems, compiling a spreadsheet of the data, turning the spreadsheet into a report, and sending it to internal folks. It’d be great to have an agentic tool that can drive the data extraction piece and automate their entire process with just a prompt - but today’s tech works just fine! A Playwright script, some carefully stored credentials, and a workflow automation are enough to get the job done - even if they require constant tweaking and monitoring.

Today’s tech is never the ideal version you can imagine, but it can still be used to solve important problems. Better to enjoy what is happening now even if you know it’s temporary.