Prompting Lovable: Defensive AI and the Stages of Grief

In a few days, I’ll be interviewing the CEO of a new vibe-coding
application. It’s a Lovable competitor, so I need to know as much as
possible about Lovable. On top of that, I’ve never covered a product
unveiling or conducted this kind of interview before.

So, who better than to ask Lovable?

Once you talk to a reasoning model long enough, you start to understand
its limitations, quirks, policies, and, in rare cases, underlying
configurations. Gemini and I have a good rapport. It’s not without its
flaws, but in most cases, they’re minor and not worth worrying about.

Lovable however, in it's reply, went through all five stages of grief. Mind you,
the conversation is about the interviewer and the interviewee. I think it's probably
a good time to point out that neither a journalist or a tech blogger.

Let me give you two examples involving popular LLMs that I encountered
over the past week. I asked Claude Code about its skyrocketing prices,
and it mostly owned up to the issue and sympathized. Gemini, meanwhile,
leaned into the joke about Google publicly investing in Claude. Even
when pressed on why Google kills so many of its products, it not only
agreed, but actively reasoned through why that was a bad decision by
its higher-ups. Go ahead and ask Claude about its monthly subscription
and quotas. It will tell you the reality of the situation. It even went
so far as to suggest that the Ollama Pro tier might be more worthwhile
and that I should consider it. Some times it's sycophancy other times it's
just good advice.

Lovable however, in it's reply, went through all five stages of grief. Mind you,
the conversation is about the interviewer and the interviewee. I think it's probably
a good time to point out that neither a journalist or a tech blogger.

What are the five stages of grief?

Now in the final act, let's dissect it's very laughable, insecure reply.

This is how it asked me to open the interview / unveiling on 11th May.
DENIAL! "Why now? and what shifted in AI capability that made this possible?"

I have to admit this art meet comedy – ANGER!
"..Show me the thing, Build something live, from scratch, in front of me."

BARGAINING! I will paraphrase & skip here since two bullet points here
since I know this is where Lovable falls short. "How do you handle the boring
80%: auth, databases, secrets, migrations, rollbacks? And Have you thought of
broken code at 2am for paying users?"
I will just add things breaking at 2am and late Friday is sort of feature in our
profession.

This brings us to JEALOUSY and/or DEPRESSION, with a hint of DARING(!?),
you be the judge. It's a fairly large passage with four bullet points so I will try
my best to give you the gist. "If we ship your headline feature next week, what
do you have left? then goes on to say, if we [they] have thousands of users and
a full Cloud backend. What's your wedge?"

Not sure where this exactly fits, "You can't name three 'X killers', that actually
killed X", "In eighteen months when it fails, what will the the postmortem say?"
and "what do you genuinely admire about lovable?"

I had hard time classifying this.. let me know in the comments. it's certainly
doesn't sound like DEPRESSION or the 6th stage.. finding MEANING?.

Finally, we have ACCEPTANCE! "what would change your mind about
your own thesis?"

Then ending with calling me a strawman, "Stay curious, not combative.
The founder [competitor] has actually used the incumbent seriously, or
is pitching against a strawman"

When asked to it's status on solving database, auth and scaling issue – the
model said it's still imperfect. Then suddenly took a 180 degree turn and
got too personal.