Lovable Projects
Quick tools to solve well-constrained problems
Dry Briner
If you're a bit of a cooking nerd, you'll know that salting your meat a day before you cook it means that it browns better and loses less moisture. However I've been frustrated by the imprecise recommendations for how much salt to put on a cut of meat - often "just let it rain". Letting it rain is fine for roasts but for steaks, depending on thickness you can easily oversalt. So I experimented salting steaks with different salt ratios and landed on my preferred ratio of 0.07%.
But calculating that weight every time was a minor annoyance that typically required a conversion and a computation. So I whipped up a quick calculator in Lovable as a progressive web app so I could save it to my iOS homescreen and figure out how much salt I need more easily!
Coffee Calc
So I'm a coffee nerd too. I have my daily pourover process down, but for less frequent processes I would typically need to look up a ratio and run a couple computations. So I built a quick calculator in Lovable to help me with three flows:
- Planning out coffee weight per brew for a new bag
- Calculating water for a cold brew batch based on weight of beans
- Prepping a single serve cold brew (flash brew)
Again, this is a progressive web app that I've saved for quick access. On an implementation note, I spent more time prompting Lovable to make the UI consistent across coffee calculations and to work well on mobile than on getting the calculations correct.
One nice feature I added was an automatic grams/oz interpreter. For the cold brew calculator, where dose values don't need the precision of a single serving, if you put in a value less than 100 the app will assume you've put in an oz value (e.g. a whole 12 oz bag of beans), saving you from needing to toggle between units in most cases.
Halloween Film Tracker
For Halloween 2025 I wanted to set up a list of horror films to watch with my wife. I have an off-the-shelf app that I use to track my general watchlist, but I wanted something specific to Halloween.
I put together my list of films, ran it through deep research to turn it into a csv with runtime, current streaming service, director, and subgenre. I considered getting an API key to a streaming availability service (e.g. api.watchmode.com has a free tier big enough for this project), but given the narrow temporal scope of this app I decided not to spend the extra effort here.
Side note - I also sent this prompt to Bolt, and while both implementations worked, Lovable gave me a black with red accents design perfect for the theme while Bolt gave me a pretty boring light mode black text implementation.
I did spend time on a couple other features. First, I wanted to give the app even more of a spooky feel than Lovable did by default. So I had Lovable add a subtle "flickering lights" effect that fired at random intervals. Spooky!
Second, my wife and I often fall into analysis paralysis when trying to decide what to watch, so I added a feature to help us pick a movie:
- The app picks 5 movies based on a runtime filter
- I pick 3 of the 5 I'd want to see tonight
- I hand the phone to my wife and she picks 3 (without being able to see my picks)
- The 1-3 matching picks between the two of us are displayed
No link on this one because I didn't want to spend the effort to implement authentication and per-user watchlists when it would just be me using the tool :)
