Lovable is Dying Again

Every few months, some existing tech is declared ‘dead’ on social media. Earlier it was Cursor, then vector databases, even SaaS was rendered irrelevant. This week, it’s Lovable, and surprisingly, it’s not a first for the AI-based web and app development platform.

A viral post by Crustdata co-founder Chris Pisarski said Lovable’s web traffic had halved, from 35.4 million in June to 19.1 million in September. “Is Lovable dying?” he asked, before listing reasons why AI coding platforms like Lovable, Bolt, and Replit are all seeing traffic decline.

Pisarski’s post hit a nerve. From developers to founders and investors, many tried to explain the “fall of vibe coding,” while some tried to defend it.

The Hype Is Over. The Product Isn’t.

But here’s the truth: Lovable isn’t dying, it’s just growing up.

Anton Osika, Lovable’s CEO, responded in his usual tone. “Every few months social media says Lovable is dying. I’m proud to announce we’re dying again.” The post blew up, of course. A thousand likes later, the debate shifted from ‘whether Lovable is dying’ to ‘what people mean when they say so?’

Pisarski’s argument was that Lovable’s early spike came from non-developers who were caught up in the “AI can build your app in minutes” fantasy. They played around, built mockups, and left. The hype faded, power users drove up compute costs, free credits were cut, and the casual crowd disappeared.

This isn’t surprising. It’s the same pattern every new platform goes through — the hype wave, the drop, the consolidation.

Replit too lost traction after throttling its free tier. Vercel’s v0 regained users by going deeper into integrations and launching a marketplace. Lovable is somewhere in between, cutting freebies, but also adding real features. It just rolled out full backend capabilities, something even its critics admit could change how teams use it.

The fall in traffic doesn’t mean fewer users. It means fewer tourists.

Emergent is another vibe coding startup that figured in the chart and the following discussion. Mukund Jha, the co-founder of the company also chimed in. “Notice the e (Emergent) at the bottom right? That little e will be much higher in 3 months,” he said, while adding that the market is catching up.

Emergent, founded by brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha, went from zero to $15 million in annual recurring revenue in just 90 days. Mukund told AIM Network that the company is actively hiring in India and is also expanding its global footprint.

What Developers Are Saying

LinkedIn comments on Pisarski’s post turned into a public focus group on the state of AI coding. Some called these platforms “prototype-only toys.” Others, like Credal CEO Ravin Thambapillai said his team runs an entire internal system on Lovable and “uses it every day.”

Many pointed out that Lovable was never meant to replace engineers. It was meant to get from idea to prototype fast. As Jacob Farrugia, founder of Orbit put it, “They’re excellent to knock up a quick prototype, but nowhere near ready for production. So we’ve gone back to proper IDEs with AI support.”

Chaitanya Choudhary, CEO of Workers IO, earlier told AIM that he believes the problems with vibe-coding are structural. “Vibe-coded code often lacks a clear specification, rationale and consistent patterns,” he said.

His caution comes from watching hundreds of beginners struggle to progress from early success to real deployment. This is what most users are realising — that AI coding tools are not about replacing engineering, but accelerating it.

Read: Vibe Coding Lets Anyone Start, But Few Know How to Finish

Still, there’s fatigue. Developers have been returning to integrated setups like Cursor, VS Code, and GitHub Copilot, where AI lives inside their actual workflow or IDE. “AI coding isn’t dying,” one veteran wrote, “it’s maturing. The magical mist is gone.”

A Reality Check?

The drop in web traffic also reflects a shift from casual builders to serious users. Lovable, after raising $200 million and being valued at $1.8 billion, can’t survive on hobbyists. It needs paying customers who build real workflows.

But, just as AI startups thrive on the ARR mirage to make a mark in the market, a nod from Jensen Huang also carries them a long way.

Recently, the NVIDIA CEO praised AI coding tools. “You’re now seeing enterprise AI companies like Cursor, OpenEvidence, I Love Lovable—these are some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, and they address enterprise,” he said.

Huang’s comments underline that enterprise AI is no longer a future trend, it’s here, and growing fast.

Recently, the company launched Lovable Cloud and Lovable AI with a goal to make full-stack app creation more accessible, which is what the customers have always needed.

That’s where most AI app builders struggle but Lovable is possibly going to thrive. Most sell the dream of a “business in a weekend” but not the reality of scaling, infrastructure, and reliability. This is the phase every new tech movement faces, when the excitement wears off, and the hard engineering begins.

Osika’s own response shows why Lovable keeps coming back. He doesn’t deny the criticism. He leans into it. “Lovable is dead, long live Lovable,” one user joked. Osika replied with a salute emoji. Someone else even built a parody site called “lovableisdead.com” — a directory of people who declared the company finished.

Lovable’s tone has always been self-aware, even irreverent. It built its brand around fun, experimentation, and speed. That’s what makes it resilient.

Melissa Kwan, a founder and long-time bootstrapped builder, summed it up best: “You gotta love hooks that go from ‘xyz is breaking the internet’ to ‘Is xyz dying?’ in a matter of weeks. Companies are built in decades. Not weeks, not months, not years.”

When the hype dies down, the companies that survive are the ones that don’t panic, or worse, pivot out of identity. Lovable hasn’t done that. It’s still building toward what Osika calls “the last piece of software.”

So, no, Lovable isn’t dying. It’s just outgrowing the internet’s attention span.

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