Show HN: We built Lovable for Mobile Apps (uses Flutter) (getavid.dev)
Hey HN. We built an AI agent, Avid, that creates beautiful Flutter Apps, much like v0 or Lovable. The agent carefully makes UI UX considerations, generates Flutter code, and you get a preview on your browser.
I've gone through lots and lots of iterations to help the agent produce beautiful results. Would love your feedback.
Ability to download App files and flutter code should be ready this coming week. Have a look and let me know what you think!
56 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadAre these tools going to replace application designers? How much work can they do, and how much remains to be done by engineers? Can they engineer complicated apps, or do they reproduce simple apps from a training set? (TODO list apps, etc.)
Is the code these systems output any good? Maintainable and extensible?
You also don't tell me this until I've already written a prompt, which is frustrating.
I think there is going to be a counter reaction towards artisanal apps which will come out of all of this.
Just how WordPress runs 70% of the web but it's 70% of the crap web.
Similarly AI will maybe create 70% of the apps but it will be 70% of the crap apps.
And this is not some sort of reflection on AI. AI is actually great tech, but it's more about the person making the app and the proof of work required to show how much they care about the product. Or in this case these apps will be associated with shady fly-by-night companies trying to sell something.
Bootstrap, Material, etc. are all just established tools in terms of visual usability and consistency. Many people are far more concerned about having something functional over something that looks completely unique or different.
Personally, I tend to dislike most UI/UX experiments in terms of usability. Not all, but definitely most are just bad compared to what most people are used to.
It's because models struggle with design, period.
They're not great at getting things like margins right and consistent across an entire app while they're trying to follow instructions for a complex design.
Similarly they understand contrast if prompted directly, but while they're implementing a complex design they'll tend to still end up making poor contrast choices with tons of default fonts everywhere.
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If you iterate more and provide images back to the model, you can start to get something better, but that's tedious and the opposite of what most people using these tools are trying to do.
And V0 defaults to the absolutely awful ui/shadcn which is the worst possible idea as AI driven development becomes popular (let's create a UI library with minimal design tokens, no package name, no guarantees on consistency or versioning because you literally cut and paste it and update it by applying diffs.)
I'm personally excited to see if larger models with multimodal output will be able to generate detailed coherent UIs, that I can then implement using a copilot for tedious parts.
To me that's the ideal flow to get something that doesn't have the "V0 Look"
The problem is that the people who are lazy about it are obvious about it, so lazy sites that use bootstrap are obviously using bootstrap, and lazy sites that use wordpress are obviously using wordpress, but it's just confirmation bias.
It's just the Girls Suck at Math problem[0] all over again.
[0] https://xkcd.com/385/
I’m not going to use a new technology just to find out what it looks like.
IMO your front page should be minimum 10 examples apps to download.
Recently I tried rork.app to generate mobile games for my kids. It is really amazing. They also give published URL which we can directly use in the mobile.
Is there any significant difference in code generation?
From a business development manager point of view, it's horrible experience. Nobody will pay for you, when you can't assure them it's worth it.
There's just a 5 message limit in free plan. How can a man decide whether it's worth it just by 5 text. There are hundreds out there.
The finest thing in startups is sales and viable product. I haven't explored it fully, as I won't pay to check someone product, but to stand out, you need to think business development differently.
For word of mouth, or initial growth, you have to showcase what's the USP you're providing, along with some proof. And users are the best proofs that you can showcase.
If you wanna make just some thousands, then it may work. For a successful startup, it's off track.
Would it not be better for the audience and use case to use a top up model? And might you be able to offer a 5-10 message free plan?