https://www.listennotes.com/e/98639ba5475a4134ae81df6741209ffc

Welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf, and today's guest is building what he calls the last piece of software the world will ever need. Anton O. Chikh is the CEO of Lovable, a platform that lets anyone build fully working software just by describing what they want. No code, no dev team, just your ideas and AI. In this episode, we talk about what that means for the future of software development, entrepreneurship, and even AGI. Anton shows off a live demo of Lovable, shares how kids and solo founders are launching real businesses in just hours, and breaks down how this tech could level the playing field for creators everywhere. If you're building anything, tools, products, businesses, this conversation might just change how you.

Think about the whole process.

So let's dive in with Anton from Lovable.

This.

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Hey, Anton, thanks for joining us on the show.

How are you doing today?

It's great to see you, Matt.

I'm good.

Yeah, awesome. Well, I don't want to waste your time. Let's just jump right into it and let's talk about Lovable. So I'm curious a little bit about your backstory. What were you doing before Lovable? How did Lovable come about? Why did you decide to build it?

Let's get the background a little bit. Yeah, sure. I go back to my childhood. No, but I also, like always a kid that picked apart technology and wanted to understand everything. and then I found this way to create games when I was like 12 and got books in the library to learn how to code. I decided to study at university with like, everyone did then. And then I thought, computer science? No, I'm going to go into physics because that was like, where all the people who became the most generalist, both in academia and industry, started here in where I'm from, in Stockholm, Sweden. That was amazing. I took way too many courses in machine learning, computer science, AI. and math. And then what I realized, I was at this place where, you know, they discovered the Higgs boson, the particle accelerator in CERN for three months. I was like, amazing, there's 10,000 super smart people here, but they're trying to solve a problem that is very hard to solve. It's like very inelastic. You don't have any real world impact. And I'm obsessed about impact and making things happen. Then I understood, I'm not going to be staying on this track in academia. so I went into building things in the industry. And for the last 10 years, I've been building AI products and specifically building great teams that build AI products together at two of the very, very well-known AI startups here from Stockholm. And then a bit more than one and a half years ago, I decided to start a new company, which is what I'm building now.

So with Lovable, can you sort of give the elevator pitch? Like when somebody asks you, what is Lovable? How do you describe it to them?

It's a way to take a prompt, an explanation of an application, and then AI will build that application for you. Like it was a software engineer and deployed.

I think it was you. I think you said at one point that you're trying to build the last piece of software. What does that mean?

Yeah, sure. I can take you to what spurred us starting the company Lovable. Look, this was early 2023 that it was clear to me like this next generation of AI can actually start reason. and it's specifically good at writing code. If you put it into an advanced system of where the reasoning engine is used to take decision on behalf of a human, then you're going to be able to build a completely new type of interface to build software products. And this AI is going to help developers become more productive. But the more interesting unlock here is for the 99% who never learned how to code. I'm not sure about you, Matt, but you've probably been frustrated by the difficulty finding great software engineers. And so I was like, my mom and everyone has asked me, like, how do I find a great software engineer? So this new interface, like you talk to an AI and it builds your product, you build it together with AI, it's going to take, let the 99% go from zero to one and enable anyone to unlock their creativity to build great companies, to just create things, creates great software. and to build businesses on top of it. So that's what we're set out to do. And the last piece of software is this, it's a platform to build software products and it's going to make sure that humans don't need to write code anymore if they don't want to.

Gotcha. So with that in mind, what do you think the role of a software developer or a software engineer? What does that look like in the future?

I talk to people who ask me this, like, Anton, what should I do? I'm an engineer. And I think engineers should just always put on the hat of seeing themselves as the person who translates a real world problem into a technical solution. And that means different things depending on what type of engineer you are and it changes over time what you do. And using AI is of course going to be a larger, larger part of that translation. And now I think what happens when you have AI that makes it faster to create software is that there's going to be just much more software and there's going to be more iteration cycles to make each piece of software very, very good. And the jargon for that in some tech companies is make them lovable. So I think that's actually the end outcome of lowering the barriers through AI and new platforms like ours, making it very, very easy to take an idea, write it in, and you get a full profit working product.

Right, right. I almost see it as like, you know, like with a symphony, right? It's almost like taking the people that are playing the instruments and moving them to the conductor. Right now, everybody can be the conductor and you're telling the various instruments what to do now. Instead of actually being the player of the instrument, you get to become the conductor.

Yeah, I feel like that's- It hooks people. Yeah.

And one thing I've loved about this sort of new era of AI software development is I don't need to necessarily build a SaaS product that I'm going out and trying to raise capital on or sell it on a monthly fee or anything like that. I can find little tiny bottlenecks in my business, little- Holes of things that I'm like, all right, that is kind of a pain in the butt. I don't like doing that every day. Let me build a little software for myself that just fixes that for me. I can just build it for myself and not have to worry about like trying to build a business around it. And I think that is one of the coolest things that software like this enables, in my opinion.

Yeah, the personal software trend is also very big. It's getting larger.

Yeah, yeah. So let's go ahead and maybe jump into lovable and give a quick demo, show people what it's sort of capable of. I know you have a project that you kind of already started working on that we can jump in and tweak with?

Sure. I prepared a project right at the head of a call previously. And what I wanted to have in that call, I was going to be asking questions. And you can use it to ask me questions. It's like a webinar Q&A app. So anyone can answer in input the question. And I'll just focus first on what happened as I built this out.

Okay.

So I basically went to Lovable, which looks like this. And I put in the first prompt, which was mock up a webinar question app. So then I didn't want it to be a fully working product where it works across devices, just a mockup. And then lovable went ahead and said, okay, hey, I'm going to build this for you. I'm going to show simple design. And then it tells me, if I want to get back in functionality, you can use the Supabase to connect and let me understand that better. So then what happened was I got this mockup UI you can see here, but it doesn't sync across devices. So if someone opens this website in one place and then just a question, I don't see it. So I just asked, how do I do that? and that's a big part of the way you're working with AI. If you don't understand, you can just ask.

Yeah. One thing that I like about what you're showing here too is that it actually recommended Supabase, right? Like if you're trying to develop a software and you don't necessarily know much about software, you might not know that you need this to be connected to a backend database. So it's cool to me that it's going, hey, we could build this for.

You, but you also needed a database. Here's what we recommend. Yep. This is a native integration at this point because most startups and simple projects, that are successful, they start on Superbase. So it's a very popular choice. And what it does is it told me like, okay, yeah, you need to just connect Superbase. And then what I did, I went up here and said, connect to a new project, now it's connected. And then it tells me, okay, now you can go ahead and add AI functionality, login, or just store data. So I said, ah, add real time sync because it expanded. And then it says, I'm going to create the data table, like the place to store the questions, and I'll change some in the UI to handle it, to connect to the database. And then I had to approve, like, okay, run this code. I got an error, and then I said, okay, fixed error, and then it worked. And so that's what happened when I built this. And if I lost open this application, I can send it to you as well. It's qna.lovable.app. If you go in, you ask me a question, you can try to do it live, then it should synchronize real time across any number of devices, which is a really useful, simple tool. And no one has to log in. It's just like you go to the, you scan the QR code, they ask for a QR code afterwards, and then I can always pick up this app if I want to have a Q&A session with a company or with someone I'm presenting to.

So let me see. I've actually got it open on my screen right now. Let me see if I, let's see, what should I ask?

Let's see, nothing too personal, okay?

Let's see, what is the coolest app you've seen built with Lovable? Let's see, submit question.

Okay, that worked.

There it is. So I actually typed that on my screen, but you're seeing it on Anton's screen if you're watching the video.

Yeah, awesome. So that's a good question. It was the coolest app I've seen built. I think I saw a better version of ChatGPT, which I liked. Like it had more keyboard shortcuts and way to customize each thread. I really like that because a lot of the innovation right now actually happens on the AI intersection, the user interface, like the user experience side. And that was one of the really cool apps I saw. It's also fun to see like people are launching, we built a Lovable app for people to launch the things they build. Oh, cool.

Almost got like a Reddit style upvote.

Yeah, like for projects that have been around, there's lots of people getting users through this. And I haven't seen all of them, but there's so many cool things that people build. That was just like me demoing how Lovable works. What I could do next is to just show you like how the AI handles a change. But if I want something to happen instantly because AI is not instant. I could show you that something you can do here is that you can edit text and style by just selecting it similar to a website. That is true.

So you don't need to wait for the AI to make little sort of-.

Yeah, for small changes. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But let me first ask you something. Do you have any style you really like to see this in?

I mean, I typically like my websites in dark mode and I always like to use like blues and purples. like my background, like colors I like to use.

So we will say something about like, and a cool hacker font and just make it look better. What I sometimes do is I just attach a screenshot to the AI, I pasted it in here for it to see like, how does it look now? Let's make it look more beautiful. But this is just how Lovable works. You can do some more things, like you can customize knowledge if you wanted to remember, like always use this way of connecting to API that you wanted to use or on some type of integration. If you want to engineer colleague to edit it, it's all kept two way synchronized for them to go to GitHub, which is like how engineers build software to date. Right. And you can invite collaborators so I could send you this link and then you'll be able to edit this project if you want to. That's most of it. We're waiting for the AI to run the change here. And the last part that a lot of people are pushing to do here now is to add the custom domain, which you might want to host, you might want to buy just a website domain for your project. I think you can even do that inside of Lovable now.

So does Lovable host the whole thing and then you're just sort of pointing your domain name to Lovable?

Yeah, I can just select the domain here. I don't think this domain is free. I'll pay inside of this flow and then it's all hosted. We're using state of the art hosting infrastructure.

Yeah, but I imagine if somebody did want to export all the code and bring it over to their own host.

Or whatever, they could do that as well. Yeah, it's super flexible. You can do anything that human engineer would like to do with this setup. Oh, nice. Here's our new style. I'm not sure I love it, but.

I did what you asked.

That's true.

That's super cool.

Yep. So that's it.

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So one of the things, like when it comes to, you know, using AI for code that I've ran into a few times, is like, I'll have it build something and then there'll be a bug and then I'll say, hey, this bug is popping up. Can you fix it? It'll fix that bug and then maybe introduce a new bug or it'll keep on like having that same bug over and over and over again. I know a lot of the LLMs have gotten better and better and better over time. We've now got Claude 4. We've got Gemini 2.5 Pro. A lot of these LLMs have gotten a lot better at coding, but I'm curious, like, how does lovable specifically maybe help overcome some of that kind of frustration that like the vibe coders might have?

Have. Yeah. So lovable is not just a call to Claude, like the new Claude model, it does a few agentic chain, which is that it tries to understand, okay, what's the context here? Like exactly what information is most relevant to solve the specific problem that you're having. If you're seeing a repeated bug, like that's not one type of situation. And then we're applying best practices that we've kind of iterated ourselves towards to solve that specific type of context that you're in. Okay, you're stuck with the same type of bug. and we feed in some of those best practices that are adopted to work for the specific technology stack that lovable applications are built on. So that's what we do today. And another important thing is that we give access to what human engineers use to debug, which is the AI is able to read all the error messages and all the logs that are created as the user interacts with the website. So that's fed into the AI system. So then you can see that if there's a bug, it can really get much more of a picture of what actually happened here and then use that in terms of figuring out the error. That's what takes most time for most software engineers to understand what is it exactly that goes wrong. If it doesn't work, it's not sufficient information to fix it. So those are some of the things we're doing, and we're working on a lot more.

Very cool. This is sort of getting more into the theoretical, philosophical kind of area. And I'm not sure if this is something you've thought about or not. So if you haven't, we can just always skip over it, but I'm curious, like when everybody has access to be able to develop any software, how do companies like actually build a moat? Like, have you thought about that at all? Like, how would a software company actually build something if like anybody else can just go and use a tool to build the same thing? Like, how do businesses get formed around this kind of thing?

I mean, you don't need a moat to build a great business. I don't think so. And I mean, most of the moats are the same. I think there is a bit of a moat in terms of just trust and knowing who's behind this, that these people who build this have my best intentions at heart. That will always remain. Then there are like network effects moats. So I guess like one on that all your friends are using it and then it becomes more productive to use this tool. everyone on that these tools connected to everything else out there. And that's like a network platform effect. And I think maybe at some point there's an economy of scale as well. You can make it give a better value proposition because you're larger. That hasn't shown to be so useful in software businesses, but maybe that's going to be the case in the future as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to shift the conversation quickly to the topic of AGI. Because I know in the past you've also mentioned that you want to help Contribute to getting to AGI. So a couple questions there. A, how would you define AGI? Cause I feel like obviously everybody kind of has a slightly different definition. And then the follow up to that is like, how does lovable or what you're trying to build sort of get us closer to that?

Yeah. My favorite definition is that at the point when anything you could hire a human remote worker for, can be done with AI. That's when you have AGI. It hedges you against that humans can do some things that only humans can, because we humans don't want to talk to a machine. We want to talk to a human. But if it's a remote, like a remote and over Slack, I think that then it's only cognitive labor. It's a pure cognitive labor. So I think that's a pretty clear way to define, is it intelligence and not just a human that has networks and connections with other humans? Right. But how do we get there? I think building systems that execute right and execute code is a huge part of this. And increasingly what I'm thinking is that we are not going to work on the foundation model layer. We're creating the most delightful and intuitive interface to interface with this type of technology. And now it's for spinning up software and that's hosted available for anyone. In the future, we're naturally adding a lot more types of interactions into our interface, like, oh, browse the web for me and find all these interfaces, these things, and then put them into a website or even like, okay, can you check for all the feature requests from my email and then implement some of them? That's the type of direction we would go for on the very long term. And that type of interface is going to be one of the most important things in how humans perceive the level that AI has reached, right? Like, a good friend of mine told me way, way back 10 years ago, the AI is never better than the UI. So if you can't as a human get value from it, then it's worthless, right?

Yeah. Do you think that like the future of UI, the future of user interface is going to be what it is now where people are sort of typing prompts and we have these sort of visual user interfaces or do you think it's going to switch to some alternate modality?

No, I think it's going to be pure mind reading in the future, right? We don't know what it's going to be yet. It's going to be a combination of things. Us humans are really good at getting a lot of information visually, so that's going to continue to be a big part. And we're not as good at getting a lot of information by reading text, I think, as just looking at a picture and boom, you get a lot of information really fast. Right. That's going to be a part of it. And then in like how you as a human communicate as much information as possible to an AI, which is going to be important as well. I mean, at some point I do think we're going to see more and more adoption of like brain computer interfaces, but just speaking or lip reading or it might be like a emerging pattern UX wise with AI.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I had some chats with people over at like Microsoft and Google and that sort of thing. and sort of their position is that they want AI to be much more predictive, right? Like it knows what you want to do before you ask it to do the thing. It's going to get to this point where it starts to understand you, it understands your patterns, it understands what you do on a daily basis, anticipates it, and then just gets ahead of you on it. So I don't know. To me, that's like a real sort of fascinating future that we're heading into with AI.

Yeah, that's huge.

Is there anything else that we didn't cover about lovable and what you've been building that you think we should be covering?

I could talk a bit about where this technology is giving the most value today. We spoke to one of our users recently, Felipe, I think it was a very fun story where he had built large companies before. He raised $50 million, hired 130 engineers, and now he's past that and he's just building a business himself. using Lovable. And then he can take all the ideas instantly and it moves so much faster, which is a bit paradoxical to having this large organization where there are many chains of communication. And it sounds very productive to have 130 engineers, right? But he's making tens of thousands of dollars on this small new business that he's growing organically. This is the stereotypical AI native founder that I think we're going to hear a lot more from in how one person can build much faster than larger companies. And we're doing where they let AI do more and more in just the building part, but also the marketing side. And all of that is going to be like one human and a lot of AI systems. So that's what we're seeing. What also inspires me a lot is that kids love to use Lovable because they are super creative, right? They love to create things. And I've seen many like 14 year olds and even younger who post like they're selling something online or their services to walk the dogs with a website built on Lovable. and increasingly now since we launched the teams plan recently, Lovable is getting huge in larger companies, like Fortune 500 companies that are individuals in teams. They accelerate how the team and the entire company takes decisions, both in the terms of like, okay, we should really build this thing. Look, I've already built it. It's working. And then you look in engineering and for building tools that just accelerates like finance, marketing, building landing pages and all of that. So it's Kofan that is a tool that's being used for so many different things. And we're just keeping up on our side.

Yeah, I think last year at some point, Sam Altman from OpenAI mentioned that he thinks within the next couple of years, we're going to see the first billion dollar company built by one person. Right. And then Dario from Anthropic just said it again like two weeks ago that he thinks within 2026, we'll probably see the first one person billion dollar company. which absolutely wild. Also, you mentioned kids are building apps. I actually had a conversation with Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft, and he told this whole story about how his daughter built an entire app for her school, and he was frustrated because she didn't even consult with him. And he's a software developer. She built it herself. I mean, what you're saying, we're definitely seeing more and more of.

It's fun that kids are going to be, of course, better than older people generally to use AI, and it's going to be such Difference in how productive you are if you're good at using AI.

Yeah, yeah. I have one like small rabbit hole I want to go down with you really, really quickly. I'm curious how the developer community as a whole has received something like lovable because I know, you know, some developers probably absolutely love it. It speeds up their time, but then there's also that sort of existential fear that, you know, their skill that they've been building is no longer needed. So how's the reception been so far?

If you just look at the product, the features, a lot of developers love that you just create a fully working application and then if you want to go in and customize, use your normal ID, you sync it with the, like sync your code base and then you're getting more done and you're shipping more value to your customer, your employer. And that's like a very positive reception generally. If you do zoom out and you're like, oh, but wait, where is this actually headed?

Yeah.

Then it is the case that people are like, wait, what's my role in all of these ARAs? But I think it's not so different from anyone working in white collar jobs that everything is going to be easier and easier to automate. If you're on top and master these tools, you're going to be much, much more valuable in the workplace. But otherwise, like you're not going to maybe have as cushy a job as a software engineer has been.

Yeah, yeah.

But you're going to have to combine that with like doing sales or doing something more manual as well. That there's going to be potentially the long term reduction in how many people sit and build software.

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And, you know, like you mentioned, a lot of the white collar work is in that same boat, right? Like if your job is sitting around looking at Excel spreadsheets all day or bookkeeping or doing research for a law firm, a lot of that work is also going to probably get automated away through AI fairly quickly too.

And just one thing on the software, the demand for software, doesn't end. There seems to be a lot of things that can be improved with software, and hence there's going to be more people building software, maybe fewer people writing code. That's how I see it.

Oh, yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. Well, Anton, this has been absolutely amazing. I know you have to get off to another meeting, so I don't want to waste any more of your time. So the app is over at lovable.app. That's the best place to go to get it.

Yeah, or lovable.dev is the normal one.

Oh, lovable.dev, okay. So head over to lovable.dev. Is there any place that you maybe want people to follow you on social media or anything like that after listening to this interview?

I share fun takes on building from Europe and on the AI space and what's happening with our advancements at my Twitter. That's my first and last name combined.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for hanging out with me and having this conversation. It's been really fun and I'm, you know, really excited to see how lovable evolves over time. So really appreciate it. Thank you.

Likewise, it was a pleasure. I'm looking forward to another chapter in the future.

Absolutely.

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