The Lovable Diaries
How a “No” Turned Into a Series
I didn’t set out to write a series. I set out to write one-off essays about tools as I tried them. I also did not plan to create videos. Yet here we are.
The first tool was IdeaGrit by Xian.
If you haven’t used it, IdeaGrit helps you evaluate whether a product idea is actually worth building and selling. You feed it your idea, it tells you the truth. I fed it WYSIWIL, my 25-year-old family wish-list app, to see if the rewrite I’d been circling for over a decade was actually worth turning into something real.
IdeaGrit did its job. It told me no. Not a good product to sell.
I want to be clear about that, because it matters: IdeaGrit didn’t fail me. It worked exactly as advertised. The answer was just “no” instead of “yes.”
That could have been the end of it. Instead, it redirected me.
WYSIWIL doesn’t need to be a product for it to be useful to me. I know it cold. Twenty-five years of additions, patches, and half-finished rewrites means I understand every corner of it: the auth, the database, the testing gaps, all of it. That makes it a great personal problem even if it’s a bad commercial one. And a well-understood problem with enough distinct technical pieces is exactly what you want if you’re trying to compare different tools against the same target instead of writing scattered, disconnected impressions.
Around the same time, I started playing with Lovable.
I expected a quick evaluation. What I found had actual depth. Enough to carry a whole arc of posts, not just one write-up and done. GitHub integration. Database integration. Test cases. Code coverage. Managed auth. Each one is its own piece of rewriting WYSIWIL, and each one is worth documenting on its own.
So that’s the series: The Lovable Diaries. Rebuilding a 25-year-old app, one Lovable capability at a time, written up as I go.
The first one is already live: The Lovable Diaries: Undo Isn’t the Same as Version Control, covering GitHub integration and the difference between Lovable’s built-in version history and actual Git.
I am nothing if not ambitious, and I have a well-worn habit of waiting for perfect before I let anything out the door. This series is partly me practicing letting go of that. I’d rather publish the pieces as I build them than sit on the whole thing until it’s finished and polished and safe.
WYSIWIL still isn’t a product. But it turns out it didn’t need to be one to be worth writing about.
More Lovable Diaries coming. And somewhere down the line, a second series for the other tools outside Lovable, who knows maybe more arcs. I mentioned I’m ambitious, right?
Author’s Note: I plan to learn how to make better videos, but again, progress not perfection.
The Inner Chamber