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4 min read

How to save time and money when building with Lovable

Read time: 5 minutes

tl;dr: Don't just start with a prompt for your next project. Instead do this to save both time and money:

  • Have a voice conversation to organize your thoughts
  • Let AI help you craft a project description and user persona (exact conversation template below)
  • Turn the conversational outputs into five powerful markdown files to ensure persistent context (exact prompt below)

How to vibe code like a pro

Most new vibe coders I meet start their projects with a prompt like "Create a dashboard to...". And when you look at the landing page of Lovable it's easy to understand why:

There are two sides to the story why most vibe coding tools want you to dive right in (in my humble opinion). The first one is noble: They remove any barrier whatsoever for people to get started. And this is great because it allows people that have no technical background or product building know-how to experience the magic of Vibe Coding instantly.

However, I think there's also the not so noble side to it: This iterative process burns through your credits faster than you can imagine. Not because the sites are evil, but because they love to benefit from the fact that most people don't have a straight line creative process. And every back and forth in your decision making will cost you both money and time.

So instead, do this before you write any prompt

The good news is: There is an easy fix to save you the trouble, and in parallel it will likely also help you build a better product. Once people are a bit more experienced, they start outsourcing their thinking process, e.g. to a chat bot. This helps organize your thoughts (and have a sparring partner that doesn't cost money each time you prompt). I recommend to go even one step further.

Do this: For your next idea, start a voice conversation with this

I have an idea that I want you to help me phrase properly. At the end, I will ask you to turn our conversation into a comprehensive project description as well as a description of a target user persona.

If it doesn't ask on it's own, make sure to ask for follow up questions so it knows what you want to achieve:

Do you have any follow up questions? What information do you need to better understand the application I want to build?

To close your conversation and get the project description and target user persona description that you asked for, say

Now give me a comprehensive description of this product as well as a description of a target user persona so that anyone will understand what I want to achieve

If you want to not lose these prompts, simply add them to your prompt library for free here.

Example: A real conversation between Gemini and a student of mine to help him organize his thinking for a tracker app called "Pregnancy zoo".

Now, it's time to join the top Vibe Coders

Great, so if you created your project description and user persona with the help of an AI voice conversation you're already ahead of 90% of other vibe coders. But here's the thing: even those top 10% are still missing out on higher quality output of their coding assistants.

AI Coding Assistants, just like any LLM, are exceptionally good at making you believe you have a conversation where they will remember anything you say. But they don't. So when you mentioned your app's vision 100 prompts ago, it now forgot even though you still have the impressions it remembers everything.

This can be absolutely fatal, because as long as these assistants don’t admit they’ve forgotten, they’ll start hallucinating or making assumptions instead of asking for facts.

And that's why you should start leveraging the power of markdown files. They are your way to provide persistent context for the things that matter most to you:

  • Product vision
  • App flow and user roles
  • Page descriptions
  • Project Design
  • Backend specifications

Once created, you upload these files to your project directory to then be able to reference them in any of your prompts. Important: if your project or requirements change, update the files so they stay the single source of truth.

Bonus: Watch me perform all these steps live in the video below.

The bottom line

Don't let those product led growth hacks fool you to just start typing but start vibe coding like a pro.

Take the time to reflect on your idea and put it into something everyone can understand. Don't do it alone, have a voice conversation instead.

Turn your coherent project description into give key markdown files so the AI assistant can reliably reference what is important to you.

See you next Friday.

P.S.: Something on your mind that you think I could help with? Simply reply to this email (: