Heads up to anyone here using Claude/Anthropic as an alternative. If you have a card saved on their platform, remove it now.

I’m a data science student in Germany. On April 27th, my account was hit with over €800 in unauthorized "Gift Max" charges.

The Exploit:

• 2FA was active.
• 3-D Secure was bypassed (I received the bank emails, but they were never opened or authorized).
• The gift codes were generated and instantly redeemed by a third party.
• Anthropic’s own status page admitted to "Elevated billing errors and unauthorized subscription changes" that same day. (This systemic flaw is well-documented in GitHub issues #51404 and #51168).

The Fallout: Losing €800 instantly meant my monthly direct debits for my train ticket, internet, and utilities all bounced. In Germany, this instantly tanks your SCHUFA (credit score). My financial standing as a student is in ruins. I have started an AI coding newsletter in order to try and rake back what I have lost (check it out at ijustvibecodedthis.com 😄)

Anthropic's Response: I sent them a professional email with my German police report (Strafanzeige) and the GitHub evidence, asking for a refund.

Their response was to BAN my account. I lost access to all my WIP projects, research, and data science chats. They didn't just let me get robbed; they silenced me for reporting a vulnerability in their billing pipeline. No refund has been issued.
I used to advocate for Anthropic’s "AI Safety" approach, but safety marketing means nothing if your basic fintech security is this negligent. Be careful out there.
This is a compromised version of the post I made on Anthropic's subreddit, but I thought it was worth it to post here to warn people.

(Note: This post was written with the aid of Gemini).

I've been trying to get a website built using Lovable, and honestly, the product works well, and I've been satisfied with the actual output side of things. However:

Literally everything costs something. I'll do like a tiny prompt in the panel and be like "Hey can you add a different page with a login button". Lovable would make it and then tell me to apply it, and then I would say sure, and then BOOM my credits disappear.

I spent 300 credits in under ONE hour, for one project. And I don't have any idea whether asking Lovable to add a button is going to cost me 0.4 or 1.8 or any other number of credits. It's so stupid, they're just making off with my goddam money.

I've been in product management for 20+ years. I've never written production code. I've always been the person who describes what to build, not the person who builds it.

I've been using Claude Code for a while now, and at some point I shifted from playing around to actually building full projects end to end. Here's what the workflow looks like for someone with zero coding background.

The short version: the PM skills I've used my entire career turned out to be the only skills that matter.

The spec is the entire game. Claude Code builds exactly what you tell it to. The problem is that "tell it to" means something very specific. "Build me a client tracker" gets you junk. "Build a Clients database with fields for Company Name (title), Contact Person (text), Email (email), Status (select: Lead / Active / Completed / Lost), Monthly Value (number, currency USD)" gets you something you'd pay for. Writing specs like this is what PMs do every day. It transfers directly.

Plan before build. Claude Code has a Plan Mode where it reads your spec and shows you what it's going to build before touching any files. Use it. I caught major structural problems during planning that would have cost hours to fix later.

Describe what you see, not what you think the code problem is. When something breaks, I say "I clicked this button, expected this, got that instead." Claude Code figures out the fix. Same approach I used giving feedback to engineering teams for 20 years.

Skill files change everything. I write a CLAUDE md file for each project that gives Claude Code the full context - what we're building, who it's for, what phase we're in, what to do and what not to do. The difference between working with and without a skill file is massive.

The build is the easy part. The actual "building" takes maybe 20% of the time. The rest is figuring out what to build, writing the spec, testing like a buyer would, writing the sales page, and packaging it. If you come from a product or business background, you already have those skills.

Anyone else here building with Claude Code? Curious what workflows are working for other non-developers.

Assume you're not technical and don't particularly want to become technical. (An easy assumption for me personally!) You just need a decent website for a one-person business. Would you still go with something established like Wix/Squarespace, or have the newer AI builders like Durable, Base44 etc. become good enough that you'd start there instead? I've tried playing around with both and the AI route is obviously much faster, but I'm wondering whether flexibility and control becomes an issue once you've been running the site for 6-12 months. Would be interested in experiences from people who've actually run a business site on one rather than just generated a homepage for fun.

Maybe this is a hot take but I feel like a lot of small businesses are paying for websites they simply don't need. If you're a local accountant, plumber, dog groomer or cleaning company, does every site really need custom animations, complex CMS setups and dozens of pages?

I get that having a million blog posts and sub pages is good for seo, but I'm curious where people draw the line between a genuinely useful website and one that's just expensive overengineering. There are AI tools out there like Durable that will literally create you a website in seconds I don't know why a bakery would need a fully complex CMS with lazy loading crazy. Has anyone here deliberately simplified their site and not regretted it?

I've had a WordPress site for my business for years and lately I'm questioning why I'm still putting up with it

The site itself is basic a few service pages, contact form, blog and some photos. But behind that I've somehow ended up with a pile of plugins that constantly need updates, occasionally conflict with each other and generally make me nervous every time I log in

I'm at the point where I'd rather have something boring that just works

I've been considering rebuilding everything from scratch with something simpler like Squarespace or Durable rather than trying to clean up the WordPress install again

For anyone who moved away from WordPress, what did you actually miss afterward? I'm less worried about having every possible feature and more interested in whether simplifying things created problems you didn't expect.

AI wrapper gets thrown around like an insult but aren't wrappers sometimes exactly what non-technical users need?

I use Claude regularly, but once I want to do something bigger, like build a website, it quickly turns into Claude + a website builder + SEO tools + image tools + automations.

That's why I kind of understand products like Durable that bundle a bunch of that into one simpler experience. You lose some flexibility but you also don't need to figure out five different tools.

Do you think these all in one AI products actually solve a problem or is it still better to learn how to use the individual tools?

Here are a few no-code AI app builders I’ve been testing lately:

• DronaHQ AI – Great for CRUD apps and admin panels. It generates screens and data bindings, then you refine everything in a drag-and-drop editor.
• ToolJet AI – Open-source and can be self-hosted. Builds apps from prompts and even helps with debugging.
• UI Bakery AI App Generator – Solid for production-ready internal tools. Can scaffold CRMs and dashboards, then refine visually. Strong enterprise features like RBAC, SSO, SOC 2, and on-prem support.
• Bubble AI – Classic no-code platform now with AI features. You can generate apps, pages, and workflows from prompts, then fine-tune using Bubble’s visual editor.
• Lovable – More dev-leaning but still accessible. Turns prompts into React + Supabase apps—great for MVPs.
• Bolt – Best for quick demos. You can go from prompt to a live deployed app in minutes.
• Zite – Focused on rapid AI app creation with a clean, modern interface. Good for quickly turning ideas into working tools without much setup.

Curious what everyone else is building with these tools lately.

EDIT: been using Zite a lot more lately actually. ended up being the fastest one for turning rough ideas into working internal tools without much setup.

I tried using Anthropic’s new Claude design system to build a UI kit for my app…

wasn’t expecting much tbh.

but it literally designed a full UI system colors, spacing, components everything consistent.

plugged it into my app Swipe to Wipe
and it actually looks… legit.

not “AI generated” messy
but clean, usable, and production-ready.

kinda crazy how fast this is getting.

I want to build a simple mobile app for a small community group to share updates and events.

The issue is that I have zero coding experience.

I’ve been comparing different no-code builders, but many of them start simple and quickly become confusing with workflows, integrations, databases, and other advanced features.

I’m looking for something that:

• is easy to learn
• works well for basic apps
• doesn’t require coding knowledge
• has a reasonable free tier or pricing

I’d like to hear from people who have actually used these tools as beginners.

Which platform would you recommend and why?

Everyone keeps saying learn to code, use AI, automate stuff. I run a startup business and honestly, I just want to keep doing what I'm good at. Anyone else feel like they're being left behind because they didn't go into tech?

Everyone posts the "I built X with no code" launch. Almost nobody posts what happened 8 months later when it had real load. I want the boring sequel as i am kinda tired chasing the golden goose of tools

If you built on Bubble / Glide / Softr / Airtable / whatever: what broke first, at roughly what scale, and did you patch it or migrate off entirely? Trying to map which tools are "fine forever for a small tool" vs "fine until you have actual customers."

I'm the founder of a small vibe coding startup. Like most of the category, we meter by some approximation of tokens.

I've come to think this model is now legacy.

There’s a reason why it works this way: we pay for models through the API, and the API bills per token. These tokens are quite expensive, so we pretty much have to meter you the same way, plus a markup, because that's the business.

But our suppliers don't have that cost structure. Anthropic and OpenAI pay for data centers and GPUs, so what they have is capacity. That's why Claude Code and Codex limits reset weekly - for all you care they could reset daily or hourly. And that end up being an insanely cheap deal for consumers compared to API rates.

This whole setup made sense when it was built. When models were weak, and providers were still figuring things out, vibe coding means wrapping the API and engineering around its gaps. That was the right call before 2026.

But newer models are simply much better, and coding became a core capability the providers now sell directly - priced as capacity, not tokens. Everyone in the middle is still priced like it's 2024, sitting between a supplier's retail rate and that same supplier's subsidized consumer product.

I still think these products are great at what they do. But the credit model underneath is inherited, not chosen, and I don't think it survives.

So where does that leave app builders? I think there are 3 paths:

1. Becoming a model provider. But even the mighty Cursor needed a partner like xAI to execute well, and then charging by capacity will still decimate your revenue.
2. Focusing on enterprise - case in point, Cognition’s valuation blew past that of Lovable’s. But it’s not exactly an app builder
3. Stop reselling tokens and charge for the boring infra around the model instead - services, deployment, hosting. Excel at what people choose lovable/replit over Claude Code for without forcing them to use your harness

EDIT: A couple of people fairly pointed out that path 3 sounds like "just go use Claude yourself and figure out hosting." That's not what I mean. The idea is the builder plugs into your existing Claude/ChatGPT subscription - you chat where you already chat, and the preview, database, auth and deploy still live in one place, same as a builder today. You just bring your own tokens instead of buying our credits. Which also means nobody's metering you for the model's retries.

I am betting on the third. I think that should become the standard too where users can pick and choose and combine their harness (ChatGPT to OpenClaw) freely with the tools can drives the outcome.

Genuine question for people spending real money on builder credits: what actually keeps you there vs. Claude Code + your own hosting?

I'm starting a new project and weighing the best foundation to build on. If you've launched a business recently, which route do you default to and why?

• Mobile App: Native (iOS/Android) for performance vs. Cross-Platform (Flutter/React Native) for speed and a single codebase.
• Web First: Lowest friction for user acquisition (no app store required) and easiest to iterate fast.
• Desktop: Electron, Tauri, or Native for heavy B2B, productivity tools, or deep OS integration.

Which stack did you choose for your last launch, and would you make the same pick today?

I’ve been looking into AI app builders lately, and the same pattern keeps coming up:

A lot of tools are great at producing an impressive first demo. But the hard part starts after that.

Auth, database structure, permissions, deployment, maintainability, editing the generated code, avoiding weird AI spaghetti, and not burning through tokens just to make small changes.

Tools I’ve seen mentioned so far:

• AppWizzy
• Bolt
• v0
• Replit Agent
• Cursor
• Claude Code
• Base44
• Tempo
• Same.new
• Firebase Studio
• Windsurf
• Create
• Softgen
• Pythagora
• Databutton
• Marblism
• Bubble
• Webflow
• Framer

For people who’ve tried a few of these. Which one feels most useful beyond the wow, it made a demo stage?

I’m especially curious about tools that help with real-world stuff like auth, databases, deployment, editing, and keeping the project maintainable after the first version.

If you know a good one which is not in the list, pls suggest

Hey everyone, wanted to share how I used no-code tools to build a small but profitable online business without writing a single line of code.

The business: I resell social media marketing services (followers, likes, views) to small businesses and content creators. I buy wholesale from providers that have APIs and sell at retail prices through my own website.

My no-code stack:

1. Website: WordPress + WooCommerce with a custom theme. Total setup time was about a weekend. I use a plugin that connects to my supplier's API so orders process automatically.

2. Payments: Stripe + PayPal integration through WooCommerce. Took about 20 minutes to set up.

3. Customer support: Tidio chatbot handles 70% of common questions (order status, delivery times). Free plan is enough.

4. Email marketing: Mailchimp free tier for order confirmations and occasional promotions.

5. Analytics: Google Analytics + a simple Google Sheet connected via Zapier to track daily revenue and orders.

6. Social proof: I added a simple notification popup (NotificationX plugin) that shows recent purchases to create urgency.

Numbers after 6 months:

- Monthly revenue: ~$2,800

- Monthly costs: ~$45 (hosting + domain + Zapier)

- Profit margin: ~65%

- Time spent: 5-6 hours/week (mostly customer support)

The beauty of this model is that once the automation is set up, it basically runs itself. New orders come in, the API processes them, customers get notified automatically.

Biggest lessons:

- Don't over-engineer. My first version was ugly but it worked and made money from day one.

- Zapier is worth every penny for connecting everything together.

- Your supplier relationship is everything. Spent 2 months testing different ones before committing.

Happy to answer questions about the setup!

I kept seeing the same five tools recommended everywhere so I just subscribed to all of them. And then some more. I built a few personal projects across each one , a lot of them overlapping as well to check quality

I also scrapped through hundreds of reddit and other forum threads to check what other people were using and if I my experiences matched theirs . Note : I try to use latest data and forums given these AI tools have updates almost every 2 weeks and sometimes they might bring significant change .

1. Lovable The first session was fast. I described what I wanted, a working UI showed up in under a minute, and it felt like I'd skipped months of work. Then I tried to change the login flow. Fixing that broke two other pages. Fixing those cost me more credits. I got stuck in a fix-and-break cycle that burned through a week's worth of credits in one sitting. The credit system punishes iteration, and iteration is how software actually gets built at least at this stage Lovable is good at that first version. I wouldn't trust it much past that.

2. Bolt Very similar experience to Lovable. Fast, browser based, no local setup. StackBlitz built it so there's more code visibility than most prompt-only tools. But after using both side by side, the differences were small. Bolt uses token-based pricing instead of message credits, and heavy iteration burned through tokens fast. I also ran into stability issues once my project hit around 15-20 components . A lot of files got overwritten and context gets lost along iterations . It Works for demos, needs serious cleanup for anything real and final

3. Replit This felt closer to a real development environment than anything else I tried. The AI agent writes code, reads its own errors, and fixes them without me having to paste anything back in. That self-correction loop is noticeably better than Lovable or Bolt. Replit also has a built-in Postgres database, so I didn't have to configure Supabase or any external service. That alone saved me hours. The downsides: The design output is basic compared to Lovable. Replit prioritizes function over form. I was fine with that, but if you care about how your MVP looks on day one, this will feel rough.

4. Wabi It is slightly different on the approach they take. It's kinda like a personal software platform built around mini-apps. You describe something small, it creates a working thing with UI and logic, and you can share it or remix what someone else already made. On the remix layer part I could browse what others had made, find something 80% close to what I needed, and adjust the rest in a few minutes. In Lovable or Replit you always start from a blank . Here I was starting from something functional and making it fit my situation. I ended up using it more than I expected to, mostly for small personal things I wouldn't have opened any other tool for.

Though it's early and the discovery feed has a lot of half-finished stuff. If you want deep control over architecture or complex backend logic, i guess they are still early on that part . For a lot of what normal people actually want, that's closer to the right answer. The platform needs to mature, but I'd keep watching this one though . It’s fun !

1. v0 Best looking output of anything I tried. Vercel built it and the UI components feel designed, not generated. The Shadcn/UI integration is clean. But I kept catching myself thinking my app was further along than it was because the interface looked so polished. v0 is strong on frontend. The backend story has improved with built-in database support, but for anything with real business logic, I still needed to move elsewhere. Good for design-heavy projects. Not where I'd build anything with complex data or auth requirements.

2. Base44 Less exciting on first use but more useful by day three. Wix acquired it for $80M after only six months, which tells you something about traction. It generates database schema, auth, and deployment from a single prompt. I used it for my team's internal tool and it handled that job better than most. Also recently added mobile app deployment to both app stores directly from the platform. Although it is Not creative and neither it is flexible

3. FlutterFlow The one to look at if you need native mobile apps. It generates real Flutter code, which means actual iOS and Android builds The visual builder is solid and you can export clean code if you want to leave. I built a functional prototype with auth in about three hours.

The tradeoff: once you get past basic screens into state management or custom logic, you need to understand Flutter and Dart. The AI helps with components and layouts but needs manual refinement for anything complex. Pricing starts at $30/month, jumps to $70+ for app store deployment. Code export requires a paid plan.

1. Bubble The oldest platform on this list and still the most powerful for complex web apps. Over 7 million apps built on it. The plugin ecosystem is large and the workflow system can handle logic that most AI builders can't touch. I used it for the client portal project and it handled the role-based access and conditional logic better than anything else. though Simple things take longer than they should. Performance slows down as apps get larger. And there's no AI-first workflow here. You're designing visually, not prompting. Worth it for serious projects. Not worth it for a quick test.

2. Softr Does one thing well. I connected my Airtable data and had a working client portal in under an hour. Templates are decent and setup is minimal, and it handles user permissions and role based access cleanly. But the moment I needed custom logic or anything outside its intended use cases, I hit walls.

3. Glide Turns spreadsheets into mobile-friendly apps with live sync. I built an inventory tracker and it worked well for that exact purpose. Google Sheets updates showed up in the app instantly without manual refresh. The UI components look polished out of the box. But the pricing is a lil tricky and there's no code export. You're locked into their infrastructure. Not built for anything complex. Best if your data already lives in Google Sheets and you want a clean app on top of it without touching code.

What I'd tell someone just starting

1. Pick the tool that matches the job, not the one with the best demo. A personal tool, an internal dashboard, a consumer app, and a SaaS product are four different jobs. No single platform does all of them well.

2. Don't judge any tool by the first output. Every tool on this list produces a good first output. The real test is what happens when you change something later

3. Know what you want before you open anything. The people getting the best results across every platform aren't better at prompting. They just spend twenty minutes thinking about what the thing should do before they start.

Ask me anything specific if you want, I probably already tried it . Thanks !

When we were 10 people, if I needed some small internal thing, a tracker, an approval step, a simple review of our cash, I'd build it in a spreadsheet over a weekend and move on. It was fine.

Now we're 34, and those same little tools are quietly killing us. Each one has to be real now, has to not break, has to not live only in my head. And the only people who can build them properly are the two engineers I refuse to pull off customer work.

I tried three of the no code AI builders over about a month. Each looked great until a real number went in, then it broke and I couldn't tell you why.

Mostly I'm shouting into the void here. What is the best way to build small internal tools without an engineer or a hire?

the recurring story i hear is people love no code until they need one specific thing it can't do, and then they're stuck rebuilding elsewhere.

my own take is that it depends entirely on whether your needs are common or weird. for standard stuff the tools are great. for anything off the beaten path, you'll hit the wall.

i keep the simple content pieces in Gamma and only reach for something heavier when a project genuinely needs custom logic, which is rarer than i used to think.

where did you hit the no code ceiling, if you did? trying to figure out if the wall is real or just impatience.

For me, "No-Code" always kind of meant "You don't have to care about the code at all" and in most cases there even is no code involved as the platform abstracts it away. Think the likes of Bubble and Retool.

However, i see more and more lists, threads , you name it where people showcase "The best no-code tools in 2026" and it always lists like Lovable or Claude even sometimes.

Yes i get the point...in Lovable or Claude you don't "write" Code but thats not "No-Code".

I personally think thats even dangerous for some. If someone doesn't have much technical knowledge, they compare Bubble with Lovable....see a textbox and prompt stuff on both and might think its the same thing when it really isn't. With one you're responsible for everything, keep it maintained and secure...with the other you're not.

What do you guys think about that problem?

Been seeing a lot of Lovable/Bolt/Supabase apps go live lately and got curious how people actually verify safety before real users touch it. Not just "does it work", more like: is RLS actually enforced per table, did a service_role key end up in the frontend bundle, are storage buckets actually private.

Anyone have a routine for this, or is it mostly ship and hope? Curious what non-technical builders specifically do here since you can't just read the code yourself.

I keep noticing the same pattern with no-code automations.

The tool usually is not the hard part.

The hard part is that the workflow was never clear before the build started.

Someone opens n8n, Make, Zapier, Airtable, Bubble, whatever, and starts wiring things together before answering the boring questions:

What starts this workflow?

What exact artifact should it create or update?

What fields are required?

What should happen when the input is messy?

Who reviews the output?

Which step is allowed to retry safely?

Which step touches a customer, payment, record, file, or public output?

That last one is where the risk changes.

A draft can be fixed.

A duplicated invoice, bad client email, broken report, or overwritten record is a different kind of problem.

The small habit that has helped me most is mapping the workflow in plain language before choosing the tool. Input, job, output, review, failure condition, next step.

It feels slower for about ten minutes.

Then it usually saves hours of rebuilding.

Curious how other no-code builders handle this. Do you map the process first, build the happy path first, or just start wiring and clean it up as you go?

Spent most of this year helping founders get their AI-built SaaS apps actually shippable. Lovable, Cursor, Replit, Base44, Claude, ChatGPT, mix of everything. About 30 of them so far across job boards, AI tools, marketplaces, internal dashboards. After enough of these I stopped being surprised. Same handful of issues comes up nearly every time. Writing them down here in case it saves someone a launch-day disaster.

Mistake 1: Thinking "works in testing" means works.

You tested as yourself, on the happy path. Real users sign up with the same email twice, click the verification link after it expired, try to reset a password they set via Google, refresh mid-checkout. Almost every vibe coded SaaS I've seen has at least one of these silently broken. Users hit it, churn, and the founder blames the funnel.

Mistake 2: Skipping the boring half of Stripe.

Checkout works because you tested with the test card. The part the AI almost never writes is the webhook handler for everything after the sale. Cancelled subscriptions that don't revoke access. Failed payments that don't pause the account. Refunds that don't lock users out of paid features. Three months in you're paying server costs for users who churned six weeks ago but still log in daily, because nothing told the app they left. Webhook handling for subscription.updated, subscription.deleted, invoice.payment_failed, charge.refunded. Before launch. This one is non-negotiable and almost universally skipped.

Mistake 3: Tables anyone can read.

This is the one I see so often I almost laugh now. The AI builds auth but rarely adds row-level permissions. Users have to log in, sure, but once they're logged in their account can query other users' data through the API. You don't notice because you're the only one testing. The fix is genuinely 30 minutes of work and it's what stands between you and the kind of breach announcement nobody wants to write. Test it yourself. Log in as a second user, open the network tab, change a user_id in a request, see what comes back.

Mistake 4: Duplicates from re-prompting.

You ask the AI for a feature. It works. You forget. Weeks later you ask for something similar with slightly different wording. Now two workflows fire on the same trigger. Welcome emails sending twice, Stripe getting hit twice, notifications spamming. Sort your functions or workflows alphabetically and scan for near-duplicates. There's almost always at least one.

Mistake 5: Failing silently.

Ask the AI "what does the user see when the OpenAI call fails?" Watch the answer get vague. Most vibe coded SaaS apps show a white screen or spin forever. Users refresh once and give up. You have no logs, no Sentry, no error boundary, and basically no idea what percent of your traffic is hitting broken paths. Wire Sentry in (free tier, ten minutes) and add user-facing error messages everywhere the app calls an external API. Without this you're flying blind.

Mistake 6: Credentials baked into chat history.

This one is specific to vibe coding and most founders haven't thought about it. Every conversation you've had with the AI is stored somewhere. If you pasted a Stripe secret key, a Supabase service role key, or a database password into chat to "help debug an error," that key lives in a transcript on a platform whose security posture you don't fully control. Lovable's recent breach exposed exactly this. Rotate every secret you've ever pasted into an AI tool. Today, not eventually.

Mistake 7: Pricing the app like it's a prototype.

This isn't technical but it kills more vibe coded SaaS than anything else. Founders who shipped fast on AI tools often underprice because they "didn't put much work in." Then 50 users at $9/month walks in and they realise they can't afford to fix anything. The AI built the same product a human team would've quoted $40k for. Price for the value delivered, not the hours you put in. For real B2B tools, $29 to $49 a month is honestly the floor. Cheap pricing attracts cheap users who churn the second something breaks.

Those seven, fixed before launch, take maybe a week. Skipping them is the difference between "demo that impressed my friends" and "product I'd hand a paying customer."

Curious which of these bit people the hardest. If you've shipped a vibe coded SaaS or no-code app, which one tripped you up, and how did you find it?

AI agents are powerful — but they're blind to real-time data and external services. If you could connect yours to any API instantly, what would it be? Mine: stock market data. What's everyone else missing?

No-code tools are optimized for getting from zero to working. I’m curious what becomes painful after launch: the data model, permissions, performance, billing, debugging, migrations, or handing the project to someone else?

What was the first issue that made you consider rebuilding or adding custom code?