Show Me The Money

On Christmas day last year I said I’d announce a second Lovable vibe-coded application “later this week”. Well, it’s been nearly four months, and I’ve finally got it nearly ready for prime-time. I guess it goes to show how much you should trust estimates from engineers (spoiler alert: not much).

Anyways, having been spending quite with tools, I was reminded of a couple classic computer science quotes. The first from the legendary Fred Brooks:

“Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.”

The second from Linus Torvalds:

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

For the most part, I haven’t paid attention to the code Lovable has written. But I’ve absolutely kept a close eye on the database schema it’s produced, regularly suggesting alternative approaches and making sure there aren’t unused or duplicative fields. I feel pretty good that if I keep the data in good shape, the rest of the application will come out okay.

Yeah. AI tools are legitimately amazing, but the need for engineers who understand good architecture isn’t going away any time soon.