Why I Use Both Lovable AND Claude Code (And When to Use Each)

Most non-technical founders waste weeks trying to figure out which AI coding tool to use. I use both Lovable AND Claude Code strategically. Here’s my exact framework for when to use each, plus the jargon you need to know to work effectively with engineers.

TL;DR: I use both Lovable AND Claude Code strategically. Lovable for speed (built Marble Jar in 3 hours). Claude Code for control (ship features in 2 days instead of 2 weeks). Here’s my exact framework for when to use each, plus the jargon you need to know to work effectively with engineers.

Who This Article Is For

• You’re a non-technical founder trying to build product yourself without hiring expensive developers
• You’re a woman building a tech company and tired of being told you need a technical cofounder
• You’re already using AI coding tools but not sure if you’re using the right ones
• You want to ship product faster and understand what you’re actually building
• You need to work with engineers and want to communicate effectively without sounding clueless

If you’re sitting on an idea and telling yourself you can’t build it because you’re not technical, this is your roadmap.

What You Will Learn in This Post

• The Real Numbers: Where We Stand
• Why There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Answer
• Lovable: When Speed is Everything
• The Marble Jar Case Study: 3 Hours Start to Finish
• My Theanna Website: 12 Integrations in One Day
• What Lovable Gets Right and Wrong
• Claude Code: When You Need Full Control
• How I Actually Use Claude Code With My Team
• The Biggest Mistake People Make With These Tools
• My Exact Decision Framework

The Real Numbers: Where We Stand

$199,584 in ARR. $16,632 in MRR. 11.8% month-over-month growth.

We’re about to cross $200K ARR and I’m documenting everything that’s getting us there. If you want to see how we got here, read my previous post on how I built the entire Theanna frontend as a non-technical founder.

The question I get asked more than anything else right now: Lovable or Claude Code? My answer is both. Here is exactly when and why I use each one.

Why There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Answer

The fastest way to kill your momentum is trying to evaluate every AI coding tool on the market. There are dozens of them: Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Base44, Cursor, and more launching every week. They all promise to make building software easy.

“Pick the tools that move you forward fastest and stick with them.”

I use both Lovable and Claude Code because they solve fundamentally different problems. Lovable is a 1 out of 10 in complexity. Claude Code is a 4 out of 10. Both are powerful, but neither is universally better. The key is knowing which one to reach for based on what you are building.

Lovable: When Speed is Everything

Lovable is one of the fastest growing tech startups in history, and the reason is straightforward: they removed every barrier between having an idea and building it. You describe what you want in plain English, and Lovable generates the entire application for you. No code, no setup, no configuration. Complexity level: 1 out of 10. If you can write a clear sentence about what you want, you can build with Lovable.

The Marble Jar Case Study: 3 Hours Start to Finish

My husband and I kept forgetting to keep our kids on track with their chores, so I built a solution. I created an app called Marble Jar that helps our kids stay on track and lets us reward them for acts of kindness and things they do around the house. Total build time: 3 hours, start to finish.

Full transparency: I have 15 years of experience in UX design and product management. I know how to define product requirements and communicate what I want clearly. That matters because effective prompting is everything with these tools. The quality of what you get out is directly proportional to the quality of what you put in.

“If you don’t know how to prompt effectively, go to ChatGPT or Claude AI and say ‘I want to build this. Can you teach me how to build a prompt that I can then push to one of these tools to build it appropriately?’”

Or if you are a Theanna customer, we do all of that for you inside of our milestones. We create the product requirement deck based on the context of your business. Then you just paste the documents into Lovable and it builds what you want. We are the business side of all these builders.

My Theanna Website: 12 Integrations in One Day

To show you the scale of what is possible, I recreated the entire Theanna website in Lovable in a single day. I designed it, created a subdomain, tested it, and pushed it to production. Along the way, I integrated 12 third-party services:

• Google Analytics: website traffic and user behavior tracking
• Microsoft Clarity: session recording and heatmaps to see exactly how users interact with your site
• VWO: A/B testing to optimize conversion rates
• Meta Pixel: tracking visitors from Facebook and Instagram ads
• Meta Conversions API: server-side conversion tracking for more accurate ad reporting
• Customer.io: email automation sequences triggered by user behavior
• Resend: transactional emails for contact forms and notifications
• Stripe: payment processing, checkout, and webhook syncing for subscriptions
• Enzuzo: cookie consent and privacy policy management for GDPR compliance
• Senja: testimonial collection and display widget
• Lovable AI Gateway: chatbot and image generation powered by Lovable’s built-in AI
• Firecrawl: web scraping for competitive analysis and content research

Twelve integrations in one day. Most founders would not know where to start with any of these individually. Lovable makes the entire process remarkably accessible.

What Lovable Gets Right and Wrong

Lovable excels at removing friction. Its agent handles APIs, connections, and integrations so you can build a fully functional frontend and backend without writing a single line of code. The tool is also only going to get better. They have massive funding and rapid growth, which means what you see today is the weakest version of Lovable you will ever use.

Where it falls short is in encouraging you to understand what you are building. Lovable has a plan feature that shows you what it is about to create and asks you to approve it. The problem is most people click approve without reading it. They are not challenging the plan or thinking strategically about architecture. They are just trying to move fast. Six months later, they cannot explain to an engineer what they built or how their integrations work together. That is tech debt, and it will slow you down when you need to scale.

“If you are going to use these tools, do your due diligence. Research what the terms mean. Understand the jargon. Know what you are approving. Because eventually, you will need to bring an engineer on staff. And if you can’t intelligently communicate what you built, you are going to waste weeks getting them up to speed.”

Claude Code: When You Need Full Control

Claude Code is what I use to build the actual Theanna product, and my three engineers use it too. The reason is simple: our backend is built in Angular, and tools like Lovable and Replit build in React. If I used Lovable for our core product, my engineers would not be able to integrate it with our existing codebase. That incompatibility is a dealbreaker when you are building something that needs to scale.

Claude Code solves this. I would rate it a 4 out of 10 in complexity. It requires more technical understanding than Lovable because you are working inside a real development environment. You need to be comfortable with concepts like the terminal, commits, branches, pull requests, and how GitHub workflows operate. But even at a 4 out of 10, it is significantly easier than writing code from scratch. The learning curve is real, but it is manageable, and the control you gain is worth it.

How I Actually Use Claude Code With My Team

Here is my exact process. If you want the full step-by-step deep dive, read my previous post: How a Non-Technical Female Founder Builds Frontend Using Claude Code.

Step 1: Pull down the [GitHub](https://github.com) repositories. Everything we build lives in GitHub. We have multiple repos: backend (I don’t touch this), frontend users (my territory), B2B frontend (admin side), frontend registration (signup and onboarding), and marketing site.

Step 2: Work only in the frontend. I never touch the backend. Ever. My time is best spent on user experience, product vision, and interface design. My engineers handle databases, APIs, and performance. This separation is what makes the whole system work.

Step 3: Build in the Development environment. I pull down my local repo in the Dev environment specifically. No customer ever touches Dev. It is where all the messy work-in-progress stuff happens. We cherry-pick the things we want to send to UAT (staging) before we send it to Prod (live).

Step 4: Use plain English and screenshots. I open Claude Code and just talk to it. I say something like: “I want to work on the challenges feed and add new functionality. Can you pull the page I am referring to?” Then I attach a screenshot. That is it. Plain language and an image.

Step 5: Create tickets in Linear. When I am done building the frontend, I tell Claude Code to commit with the ticket number and push to GitHub. I have Claude Code generate detailed requirements for the ticket including what the project is, how everything should work, what the engineer needs to connect the backend, and what APIs and endpoints we need. We use Linear for all project management.

Step 6: Hand off to my lead engineer. He gets a complete Linear ticket with clear requirements, a link to the GitHub pull request with all my frontend code, detailed instructions for connecting the backend, and a working visual reference because I already built what it should look like.

The Results

For our challenge prompts feature, I built the entire frontend in Claude Code and we pushed it to production in under two days. My engineer had zero questions about what I wanted it to look like. Not a single Slack message asking where a button should go. Before this process, the same feature would have taken a minimum of two weeks in back-and-forth.

“Two weeks becomes two days. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a fundamentally different speed of building.”

The reason I prefer Claude Code for our core product comes down to control. I want to understand what is happening in my codebase. I want to make informed decisions about architecture. Lovable abstracts the thinking away from you, which is great for speed but limits your understanding. Claude Code forces you to engage with what you are building, and that makes you a better operator as your company scales.

I also use Claude Code for our marketing website, which is hosted on Vercel. I can push commits directly to production, which gives me full control over deployment without depending on anyone else. That level of autonomy requires more technical knowledge, but the trade-off is worth it.

The Biggest Mistake People Make With These Tools

The most common mistake I see founders make is treating these tools like magic. They approve plans without reading them, integrate services without understanding how they connect, and ship code without knowing what it does. Six months later, they are stuck with a codebase full of tech debt that they cannot explain to the engineer they just hired.

“The goal is not just to ship fast. The goal is to ship fast AND understand what you are shipping so you can make better decisions as you scale.”

If you are going to use these tools (and you absolutely should), invest the time to understand what they are doing. Read the plans before you approve them. Research the terminology. Learn the architecture. Because eventually, you will need to bring an engineer on your team. If you cannot communicate what you built and why, you will waste weeks onboarding them. This is exactly why Theanna exists: we teach you the business side of building tech so you are never lost when the conversation gets technical.

My Exact Decision Framework

After building with both tools for months, here is the framework I use to decide which one to reach for. Use Lovable when:

• You need to test an idea quickly (3 hours to MVP)
• You are building a standalone project that does not integrate with existing code
• Speed is more important than architectural control
• You want to create a landing page or marketing site fast
• You are building in React or the framework choice is flexible
• You want to move fast without worrying about underlying architecture
• Complexity: 1 out of 10

Use Claude Code when:

• You are building your core product with a specific tech stack (like our Angular backend)
• You need full control over the architecture
• You are working with engineers and need to collaborate on GitHub
• You want to understand exactly what is happening in your codebase
• You are building something that will scale significantly
• You need to work across multiple environments (Dev, UAT, Prod)
• Complexity: 4 out of 10

Here is how this plays out in practice across my business:

• Theanna product: Claude Code (full control, Angular, GitHub integration)
• Marketing website: Claude Code (Vercel hosting, direct commits to production)
• Quick tests and experiments: Lovable (speed and ease)
• Side projects: Lovable (like Marble Jar)

Both tools are getting better every single day. Use the one that makes sense for your specific use case. And if you are serious about building a tech company, learn to use both.

This blog post is part of my journey to $1M ARR with Theanna. Every week I share the real numbers, the real process, and the real lessons from building a tech company as a solo female founder.

If you are a woman who wants to build a tech company without writing code, without needing permission, and without waiting for someone to fund you, Theanna was built for you.

And if you want to follow this journey, subscribe to this blog. I am sharing everything. The wins. The losses. The revenue numbers. The experiments. The stuff that most founders never talk about.

Thanks for being here. Let me know what you think in the comments!

— Nomiki

Key Takeaways: Lovable vs Claude Code for Non-Technical Founders

• Lovable is 1/10 complexity: Perfect for non-technical founders who need speed. Build complete apps in hours with integrations built in. No coding required.
• Claude Code is 4/10 complexity: More control, better for core products with existing tech stacks. Requires understanding development architecture and GitHub workflows.
• Frontend vs Backend matters: Lovable handles both for you. Claude Code lets you focus on frontend while engineers handle backend. Know which you are working on.
• Never approve without understanding: The biggest mistake is building fast without knowing what you are actually creating. Read the plans. Learn the jargon. Own your architecture.
• Use both strategically: Lovable for testing and standalone projects. Claude Code for your core product and when you need architectural control.
• Know your tech stack: If your product uses Angular or any specific framework, Claude Code lets you work within that. Lovable builds in React.
• Speed vs Control trade-off: Lovable removes all friction but abstracts away complexity. Claude Code gives you full control but requires more technical knowledge.
• Environment architecture matters: Working in Dev, UAT, and Prod requires understanding what each environment is for. Don’t skip this step.

P.S. If you want hands-on help building with these tools, join Theanna. Kyle Cupples runs four workshops a month plus dedicated tech support calls. Everything you need to build without writing code. Get 50% off your first month →