I read Lovable, Devin, and 8090's docs. Here's the checklist.
The morning test
Here's the bar I hold every build tool to. Could a non-technical founder describe a feature at breakfast — "customers on the annual plan should skip the setup fee" — and have it live in production, working correctly, by lunch?
Not a prototype of it. The real thing, wired to the real data, that you can charge money against.
Almost nothing passes. So I spent a week reading the public docs and pricing pages of the three tools founders ask me about most — Lovable, Devin, and 8090 — to figure out exactly where each one stops. This isn't a takedown. Every one of them is good at the slice it owns. The problem is that a slice isn't a product.
Four tools, four slices
Credit where it's due, based on what each company publishes as of July 2026.
Lovable is the best on-ramp I've seen for turning a description into something you can click. Effortless prototypes, minutes not weeks. But a prototype is a demo of an idea, not a system you'd trust with a customer's credit card. It gets you to "look at this," not "sell this."
Devin is a genuine engineering teammate — it picks up a ticket and writes code like a capable junior. The catch is right there in the workflow: it starts after the ticket. Someone technical still has to translate the founder's intent into a spec precise enough to hand over. Devin is great for engineering orgs that already have that muscle. Most early startups don't.
8090 has, in my read, the sharpest thesis of the three: software should be built from requirements, with audit trails, so you can prove why every decision was made. I agree completely. But they deliver it as a managed service reportedly around $1M a year — a team you hire, not a tool you use. The right idea, priced and packaged out of reach for the founder who needs it most.
So you end up stitching: Lovable to sketch it, a contractor or Devin to build it, someone else to own the requirements. Four disconnected tools, and the seams between them are where founder projects quietly die.
The checklist — and the three rows that decide everything
I scored each tool across twelve capabilities. You can run the same rubric on anything you're evaluating. But three rows separate a prototype toy from something you can build a company on:
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The PRD-edit change loop. When you change your mind — and you will, weekly — do you edit a plain-English requirement and watch the software update, or do you file a request and wait on a human? If the spec and the code can drift apart, they will.
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Data model and architecture derived from requirements. Does the tool reason from what your business actually needs into the right tables, relationships, and structure? Or does it guess a schema from a vibe? This is the difference between software that survives your second feature and software you rebuild.
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IP ownership. Read the actual clause on the actual pricing page — don't take a summary's word for it, including mine. Who owns the code, the model of your business, the requirements themselves? If the answer is "not fully you," everything else on the checklist is moot.
This is the whole reason Codalio exists. The wedge is simple: vibe coding gets you a prototype, spec-driven work gets you a product. So we productized the entire loop — requirements to data model to working software to the change loop — as something you use yourself, self-serve, no $1M contract and no engineering org required.
What this looks like on a Tuesday
Picture the moment every founder hits. You launched. Customers are using it. Now you want to change the pricing rule you shipped six weeks ago.
With four stitched-together tools, that sentence becomes a project. Which layer holds the pricing logic? Does the prototype tool even know the production database exists? Who has to be free to make the edit, and how long is the queue? The change is trivial; the coordination is where the week goes.
With one closed loop, you edit the requirement in plain language — "annual customers skip the setup fee" — and the data model, the logic, and the live software move together, because they were never separate things. That's the morning test, passed.
So the practical move this week isn't "pick a tool." It's this: write down the next feature you want as a real requirement. Name the data it touches. Name who owns the output. Then hold every tool — Codalio included — against those three rows before you build a single screen.
Start with the spec, not the screen
If you're the founder holding the intent but not the codebase, Codalio is built for exactly that gap — it turns your requirements into a real data model and production-grade software you own, and keeps the plain-English spec and the running product in sync when you change your mind.
Start by getting your requirements straight: codalio.com. You'll walk away with the exact questions to answer before you build — the same three rows above, plus nine more — so you evaluate any tool, and any contractor, from a position of clarity instead of a demo.
Features evolve fast, so run your own evaluation before you commit.
References
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Lovable — public product docs and pricing, accessed July 2026
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Devin (Cognition) — public product docs and workflow pages, accessed July 2026
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8090 — public site, service description, and pricing references, accessed July 2026
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Codalio Startup Software Requirements Gathering Worksheet