From Lovable to Kilo: When Your AI Prototype Needs to Grow Up

Making the Switch: Lovable to Kilo App Builder

TLDR: Lovable excels at rapid AI-powered prototyping but leaves you stranded when it's time to ship. Kilo App Builder offers the same conversational coding experience while keeping you inside a full engineering platform, eliminating the dreaded "export to void" problem.

Look, we've all been there. You fire up one of these AI app builders, describe what you want, and boom — something appears. It's magic. You iterate through chat, you refine, you show it to people, and they actually want to use it. Success! Until you realize you now need to turn this prototype into something real, and suddenly you're staring at exported code wondering where the heck you're supposed to deploy this thing.

This is what the Kilo team calls "exporting into the void," and it's a real problem with tools like Lovable. The platform that helped you build your app can't help you ship it. You're left configuring hosting, rewiring authentication, and essentially starting over with all the boring infrastructure work that made you reach for an AI builder in the first place.

Kilo's approach is different in one fundamental way: App Builder lives inside their complete engineering platform. Your prototype doesn't need to graduate to a different system. When you're ready for more sophisticated development, you access Orchestrator mode for coordinating complex agentic workflows, parallel agents for working on multiple parts simultaneously, and one-click deployment through Kilo Deploy. The same context, the same codebase, no cliff.

For architects and teams evaluating these tools, the migration path matters enormously. If you have an existing Lovable project with real users or significant custom logic, Kilo provides a concrete path: export via GitHub, open in Kilo (VS Code extension, JetBrains, or CLI), and let specialized agents start working with your React plus Tailwind plus Vite codebase immediately. You keep your Supabase connections or migrate them — your choice. But if you're just exploring and prototyping, you might not need to migrate projects at all. Just switch your workflow to App Builder and get the same conversational flow with access to 500+ models and no subscription walls.

The model flexibility deserves attention. Lovable picks the model for you. Kilo lets you choose from hundreds, including free options like Devstral 2 and grok-code-fast-1, or switch to Claude or GPT-5.2 when you need heavier reasoning. You can change models mid-session if something isn't working. That's real developer control, not just convenience.

Key takeaways:

• Lovable's "export to void" problem creates a significant cliff between prototype and production
• Kilo keeps you inside one platform from ideation through deployment
• Model flexibility (500+ options including free tiers) gives developers control over the AI reasoning
• Memory Bank feature preserves architectural context across sessions, avoiding re-explanation overhead
• Teams can migrate existing Lovable projects via GitHub or simply adopt the workflow for new work

Tradeoffs:

• Staying in one platform means vendor lock-in, but you gain seamless prototype-to-production flow
• Model choice flexibility requires understanding which models suit which tasks, but removes arbitrary provider limitations

Link: Making the Switch: Lovable to Kilo App Builder

This content was generated from newsletter sources and may not fully represent the original authors' intent. Always refer to the linked sources for complete information.