By request, here is my list of AI app development tools that I’ve used and recommend you check out, as of March 2025. It’s grouped by amount of code and roughly stack-ranked by quality and ease-of-use.

• low-code: Lovable, Bolt, Vercel v0
• mid-code: Val.town, Replit
• full-code: Cline, Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor, Aider

the low/mid-zone is the most vibe-codey, by the “never look at the code, use voice dictation, wear sunglasses” definition of vibecode. this is simonw’s interpretation of the og Karpathy.

I’m not including no-code things like Glif, GPTs, n8n or various mixed-agent-builder platforms etc which are a different post.

if you want to make a simple little web app and haven’t tried Lovable or Bolt recently I’d strongly recommend checking those out. Build via chat, don’t need to look at the code if you don’t want to, and really consistent. They both integrate tightly with Supabase for database, authentication and asset storage, and work well. Configuring your app via chat with inline “Login to Supabase” buttons is cool. Vercel v0 does similar but a bit more work to configure atm

Valtown is the “mid-code” part of the spectrum. You’re looking at code, but the AI assistant Townie is probably doing a lot of the work for you. I looooove Valtown. it’s friendly, super easy to use and debug, fun to find and remix other people’s projects, and the team is great. The new multi-file Valtown Projects feature lets you build ‘real’ apps. They also natively support databases, assets/blobs, and even email send and receive. The only negative (and for me this is nbd) is that it only supports Deno-flavored js/ts

Replit is a full notch more code-heavy than Valtown. it’s reliable and can run code in any language, but it is also a lot more complicated to use and debug. maybe more suitable for ‘serious’ projects but I still prefer Valtown if I can.

The “full-code” side of the spectrum is Claude Code, Cline/Roocode, Windsurf/Cursor, aider. Much has been written about this elsewhere. My tldr: Cline is maybe most approachable since you can use it in VScode, which you probably already have installed, but it’s also fast & loose with context tokens and can run up $ bills quite quickly. Claude Code is dope, really nice TUI, some quirks but smart overall. Windsurf and Cursor are maybe the most friendly for developers who want a more curated experience, and Windsurf is much better than Cursor imho. In both cases the built-in browsing and docs tools are great. they all support MCP servers too. Aider is the most hardcore, super powerful, much more involved but produces amazing results if you know what you’re doing.

FWIW I find these tools really take 2-3 hours to properly learn and would recommend you bucket accordingly. takes 10-15 mins to get setup, first hour kind of like eh, second hour is actively productive.

Lastly, everything in this post will be out-of-date as soon as I press publish. generative AI is nuts rn