Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:31:42 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:31:42] S1: I started using Cursor and Claude Code a few months ago and I haven't looked back, but at that time, these teams have been moving like crazy. So I don't want to say I wouldn't trust them. I don't know what the current state is. But for me, it was basically the issue of I felt that Bolt was being very opinionated on how I should do things. And I felt like my knowledge has gotten to a point where I can graduate and be more in control. By the way, I think that the main difference between all these tools is basically the harness. So the models are all the same models. I'll run Claude within Cursor, I'll run it within Claude Code, and it's also the models that Claude is also the model that is underlying Bolt and Lovable, but basically, Bolt and Lovable will add a bunch of levels in the middle that will take all kind of guesswork and hard decisions out for the user. So the user doesn't have to make these hard decisions. So it's also very easy to build, but the flip side of that is that you have less control. And basically Claude Code is just taking Claude and shoving it straight in your code system and giving it full tools and to do whatever it wants, but also with that comes a lot of decisions that you need to make. So I don't know if you can't build really amazing production apps using Bolt or Lovable now, but I think basically if you want the most cutting edge abilities of the models and you want to be able to make all the decisions on your own, it's probably best to be on one of these tools.
00:33:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:33:13] S0: What I'm feeling and hearing is that planning work that you did, that's the stuff that Lovable, Bolt, and would you put Replit in that bucket too? [00:33:21] S1: Yeah, for sure. Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Base44. [00:33:21] S0: v0. [00:33:24] S1: Yeah, v0, all same bucket. [00:33:27] S0: So essentially, they're doing that planning for you. And as you said, they're very opinionated. They try to make it easy. So it's just like, "Here's how to do it. Here's the way we think is best for people." And what you're saying is once you're trying to get a little more serious about it or want to go in a different direction, you don't have the power to change how they plan. So Cursor lets you do that. [00:33:49] S1: Yeah, I don't want this to come out like I'm badmouthing them. Base44, let's say. [00:33:53] S0: No, absolutely. [00:33:53] S1: Yeah. Base44 does an amazing job at basically taking all the complex guesswork out of building product and just allows you to just go with the vibes and build, but it will do sign in with Google for you and it will do a database, but then you don't have decisions on what database am I using. Do I need sign in with Google this way or another way? It would just do it out of the box. So that's basically the trade-off there. [00:34:16] S0: Awesome. Shout out Maor, the founder of Base44. [00:34:20] S1: Yeah. Maor Shlomo. Yeah. He's amazing.
00:34:20 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:20] S1: Yeah. Maor Shlomo. Yeah. He's amazing. [00:34:23] S0: Okay. I just love how this is like the way you're like flinging, what's the word? Slinging models like Gemini 3 for frontend. I love that you've never written any code and you're just like, "Cool, use Gemini for this and Claude for this. And I'm just working on Cursor, talking to this CTO, helping you build stuff and build significant product."
00:34:48 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:34:48] S1: Yeah. We just live in the craziest of times where basically the world changes once a week, it feels like. And there is just no boundaries. You can use all of these just on your regular MacBook or regular laptop. And I have these moments, I call them time machine moments, which is basically this week, for instance, I was prepping for the podcast using Claude with a project. I was building, I was fully localizing StudyMate from Hebrew to English, which I did in two days, which would probably take a dev team weeks. And I was building a personal site, which went from no domain, no nothing, to live on a domain within an hour and a half. And I was doing all three of these in parallel. And there was a point where basically all three of the agents were running, so I didn't have anything to do. I just had to let them think, and these are the time machine moments where I feel like I was in the future and I just stick my head out of the time machine and whoever's next to me, at the moment it was my wife, I'll just say, "We live in the future." And she'll be like, "Huh, what?" And I'll be like, "No, no, don't worry about it." But it's just basically so crazy that all these things are just an API away. You can use anything. So I think it's an awesome time to be curious and optimistic and hardworking.
00:36:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:36:08] S0: These are my favorite kinds of podcast guests. People that are living in the future, figuring out all these things and then are just kind of come back, as you said, poke your head out of the rocket ship and just like, "Hey, here's this thing that I figured out. Here's where we're going." [00:36:20] S1: Yeah, best time to be alive. So awesome. So it looks like it's finished. So now what we're going to do is we're going to run the app locally and we'll be able to see what Composer ended up building and we're going to see if anything else is needed on our end to maybe do some manual review. Does that sound good? [00:36:42] S0: Sounds great. And I love, that was like, I don't know, a few minutes where if it was a human engineer, it'd be like days, maybe a week for work. [00:36:49] S1: For sure. Yeah, for sure. No, Composer like the one thing is it's just so, so blazing fast, keeps you in flow. So yeah, full features take minutes. [00:37:00] S0: And it probably costs a couple bucks in AI credits. [00:37:04] S1: I don't even look. I used to be so stingy about paying for products and now I'm just basically, I look at it all as tuition, as stuff that I'm paying for learning. So I don't know how much it costs, but it's definitely worth it. [00:37:18] S0: That explains why they're the fastest growing products in history. [00:37:21] S1: 100%.
00:37:21 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
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