AI Can Design It, But Can It Ship It? The Real Limits of Prompt-Based Products

Over the past year, tons of new tools have popped up claiming you can go from a simple prompt to a working product. Some, like Lovable, are actually pretty impressive. You type in a sentence, and boom: it gives you a slick design.

Honestly, it feels like magic at first — especially if you’re a solo founder trying to move fast.

And it is, to a point.

At AgentWeb, we’ve been using Lovable ourselves to sketch out ideas. It’s great for quickly mocking up dashboards, landing pages, onboarding flows — that kind of stuff. It definitely helps speed things up early on.

But here’s the catch: it’s one thing to make something look polished. It’s another to make it actually run: with real data, real users, and real edge cases.

Real product building means connecting APIs, handling errors, managing weird edge cases, doing auth flows, making sure it scales... none of which a prompt tool handles today.

AI doesn’t do any of that, yet.

These tools still need someone who knows how everything fits together. They don’t understand your backend. They can’t figure out your data model. They might go on vision quests while building your tool. And they’re definitely not going to debug your code perfectly.

So here’s how we think about it: tools like Lovable are awesome starters. But finishing strong still takes great engineers.

In fact, we’d argue AI is making good engineers even more valuable. More people can start something now, sure. But finishing? That’s a whole different league.

From Prototype to Product

When we started AgentWeb, Lovable helped us get the UI sketched. But we knew from the beginning we weren’t just making a pretty dashboard. We were building something that actually runs campaigns, writes reports, and handles real work.

That meant building a system with:

• A clear plan

• Clean data

• Smart constraints

• A feedback loop to improve things over time

That’s what AgentWeb is today, an actual AI-powered marketing teammate, not just a design tool.

So here’s our big takeaway:

AI can help you get started fast.
But if you want to launch something real, you still have to build it right.

Our stack looks something like this:

• AI gets us started fast

• Engineers build what actually works

• And we never forget the user’s end goal

If you're trying to bring a real product to life, you’ll probably hit the same moment we did, where the prompt stops being enough.

That’s where the real work (and the real fun) begins.

Book time with Matt to walk through your current marketing workflow and try AgentWeb free for two weeks.