A new wave of AI-powered builders, such as Lovable, promises to take you from an idea to an app in record time. At first glance, the value feels obvious: describe what you want, and there you go: the system spits out code you can run. Fast, magical, empowering.
But then reality kicks in...
What looks like a dream at the start often becomes a struggle once you try actually to iterate more on top of that. The first version runs fine, sure, but every new feature, bug fix, or integration drags you deeper into the mess. Suddenly, you’re staring at piles of auto-generated code patterns, inconsistent logic, and fragile connections that only barely hold together. The “instant app” turns into a long-term liability.
And here’s the thing: this isn’t just a tooling flaw. It’s structural.
The model is wrong
Generators like this rarely maintain a clean internal model of what your app is. It’s perfect for demos. It’s terrible for software that actually has to breathe inside an organization - every regeneration risks overwriting earlier fixes. Every modification pulls you further from whatever the AI originally “meant” when it generated that block of code.
It’s the fastest way to technical code debt.
There’s a better way. Instead of hardcoding everything instantly, you capture the app’s intent, its structure, flows, and logic, as metadata. That metadata becomes the living blueprint. The code? It’s generated on demand, consistently, repeatably, and with guardrails in place.
Need a change? Adjust the metadata and regenerate. Want to evolve the app? The intent stays intact, and the code follows. No working your way through AI spaghetti code to decipher what happened.
This is the quiet power of metadata-driven code generation: speed and maintainability work together, rather than against each other.
With the Betty Blocks metadata-first approach, they unlock the balance we actually need: the same “idea-to-app” magic plus the ability to scale cleanly. That’s the difference between a short-lived experiment and an enterprise-ready platform.
One stalls. The other grows with you.
And if we’re serious about democratizing software building, whether you call it low-code, no-code, or vibe coding, then we have to care about what happens after the demo. Because building fast is easy. Building something that lasts?
That’s where the real fun begins. Try for yourself here and build your first app in minutes