This week, I’ve been experimenting with using AI to build tools for me. To continue my earlier carpenter metaphor: this feels a bit like building jigs that help you build the actual product.
Yesterday, I was specifying animations in Figma Make. I asked it to use the motion.dev library so that whatever I defined would be readily usable by the dev team. Pretty soon, though, it started feeling too cumbersome to wait for it to tweak individual animation parameters, so I asked it to build me an editor instead.
For each view in the prototype, the sidebar shows the components I want to animate and lets me tweak the parameters until the page’s choreography feels just right. One small detail: when I was assessing transitions between two views, I found it distracting that the sidebar contents changed with the view. So I added a button to collapse the toolbar and remove all that extra motion.
All in all, I was pretty happy with the quality of Figma Make, especially now that it lets you use more advanced language models under the hood.
My other experiment was with Lovable. They had a free Sunday special to celebrate International Women’s Day, so after about half a year, I decided to give the service another try. I need to build a landing page for my upcoming mobile app, and I’d rather avoid monthly SaaS fees, as one does nowadays.
That said, I didn’t like the idea of getting stuck with Lovable either. Also, I didn’t have the time to create the content yet, so I needed a way to enter it later without spending too many tokens.
Together with Lovable AI, I came up with a plan: I designed the placeholder layout for the page and built a simple CMS inside Lovable, along with a button that exports the whole page into a JSON file, sends it to GitHub Pages, and builds and hosts it there. This way, I can update the site through my CMS editor in Lovable without spending tokens, while hosting it on GitHub (for free).
I still had some free Sunday left, so I built two more sites. One of them was for our Bängeri podcast. Lovable even built me a GitHub Action that syncs new podcast episodes from the Apple Podcasts library and embeds related videos from YouTube.
I have to say, I liked the quality of the UIs I was able to get with very little prompting in Lovable. Overall, it felt much more robust than it did last fall.
(Future comment: I ended up migrating both projects to Claude, since there was no point in operating with middlemen like Figma Make and Lovable.)
Matias Pietilä 