from Hacker News

Testing the latest AI tools for prototyping and building simple websites

by nadis on 3/26/25, 6:03 PM with 53 comments

  • by siliconc0w on 3/30/25, 4:25 PM

    Lovable definitely seems to have a bit of a secret sauce.

    I've been trying to figure out how they do it. First, Claude3.7 is probably their backend model. Gemini 2.5 Pro is definitely getting there but I'm pretty sure Claude is still king for this kind of work. Second, if you break up the design and then implementation, you get significantly better responses. Finally, you have throw in a bit of what I'm calling stable-diffusion-prompt-isms where you almost excessively drop references to known brands or design philosophies to trigger those 'latent' memories and steer away from the more-basic stuff that seems to otherwise surface.

  • by siquick on 3/30/25, 9:40 PM

    Cursor has gone to the next level with Gemini 2.5. The reasons it gives for what it’s doing are well thought through and far more in context.

    Gemini seems to now advise you when you’re telling it to do something that may not make sense - first time I’ve really seen a non-Yes Man LLM. It’s more like a Yes-but-are-you-sure man.

  • by yahoozoo on 3/30/25, 5:20 PM

    Considering all of these probably use either ChatGPT or Claude, is this entire business basically which company sends the best system prompt with your ask?

  • by emurph55 on 3/30/25, 4:46 PM

    On a slightly related note, I have created a tool for generating web pages based on any subject using different "themes". You can create one here with a "Mario-Bro's" theme for example: https://thedeadweb.eu/?q=honey&style=mario-bros

  • by qingcharles on 3/30/25, 5:45 PM

    Did this article really have no links to the tools?

  • by PeterStuer on 3/31/25, 6:16 AM

    Roo-Code with Claude Sonnet 3.7 as the backend has worked near perfect for me for small websites.

    If you point it to a site to clone with instructions on what to change, you get very good results in half an hour's work and <5$ spent.

    Pretty stiff competition for the bottom end of the web creation/maitainance market for sure.

  • by jeswin on 3/30/25, 5:29 PM

    Slightly meta. I was trying to understand your product. Does Codeyam simulate how the software looks/works without actually running it?

    That seems impossible for any non-trivial project. I may have misinterpreted the idea, but calling it a "simulator" and the video leads me in that direction.

  • by isoprophlex on 3/30/25, 3:48 PM

    If you want absolute troglodyte style pages, Claude (either claude code or vanilla claude.ai) is good enough for me.

    Instruct it to do vanilla js + css + html, no weird/annoying frameworks, and you can whip up something in minutes

    Built from the couch: https://www.agile9000.org/

  • by kylecazar on 3/31/25, 12:17 AM

    Are the UI's for bolt.new and lovable really that similar? That's nuts.

  • by asdev on 3/30/25, 5:56 PM

    to the two designers that go on HN, rejoice! your jobs are safe