Comment by qeternity
1 year ago
I don't really understand how a well funded startup like this, with something that is relatively trivial, yet critical to their product, decided to just shove it into GitHub.
1 year ago
I don't really understand how a well funded startup like this, with something that is relatively trivial, yet critical to their product, decided to just shove it into GitHub.
Their product is the creation of Git repos. Putting it on the platform their customers want to use makes a lot of sense.
They probably should have had a backup location from day 2 though, I agree. If nothing else, in case of a GitHub outage.
> Their product is the creation of Git repos. Putting it on the platform their customers want to use makes a lot of sense.
Maybe I read the landing page very wrong, but it seems to be a "app building toolkit" of some sorts? Not just "creation of git repos".
They could have made the GitHub repository creation happen when the user does some action, instead of at the stage of "create app" which probably every single user does at least once, even people with no intention of actually building apps.
Or better yet, offer their own viewer for Git repositories they themselves host. It's not overly difficult, and the `git` CLI tools even ship with a web UI you can take inspiration from.
If you want a GitHub like UI Forgejo is FOSS too.
If you read the post-mortem, you will see that this has nothing to do with the platform their customers want to use, and everything to do with creating repos internally for their own organization.
Their product has change tracking which is clearly powered by git repos on GitHub.
So again, I ask, for something that is a SPOF, why rely on a third party?
What? Well that's crazy.
What value does Lovable's product add, then?
It doesn’t add value. It fills them with LLM-generated code.
I see this sentence a lot:
"How can somebody who does X just do Y?", implying that Y is somehow bad or wrong in the context of X, or contrasts with the experience level implied by X.
Maybe it's true of the subject. Maybe they should have known better. But I think it's beneficial to take a step back and view it from the perspective of readers: Many people - even people familiar with X and Y - may have no idea why Y is bad in the given context, or, more relevantly, why this should be obvious, as you imply by using the word "just". I think there's a lot of benefit to be gained by trying to observe yourself, and notice when you are writing in this style, and add more context.
Honestly, doesn't surprise me much. Homebrew, the most popular package manager/repository for macOS, basically lives on GitHub and bases everything on top of it. Over the years, I think there been times when they've actually brought down GitHub (or close to at least).
Most folks seem fine with it, at least it still lives on like normal as far as I know. I think engineering principles flew out the window a long time ago, all people care about now is shipping as fast as they possibly can.
Your observation about shipping fast to build an MVP house of cards is true. However, Homebrew is a free package manager, that likely relies on GitHub due to cheap or free storage for a free tool.
My assumption is that lovable is not free, so using a cheap or free service while it is taking money from their customers fits squarely into the categorization of poor engineering and possibly incompetence.