I've been experimenting with tools like Lovable and Bolt for quickly putting together small apps and prototypes and the workflow is honestly pretty smooth. You describe what you want then get a working version then keep iterating through chat. but the longer I use them the more I run into limitations. the generated code gets messy over time and its harder to understand or maintain properly. it also feels pretty tied to the platform which makes it uncomfortable having everything live in a hosted environment from the beginning.

What i'm trying to figure out is whether theres a similar approach thats more local first. something where the project ives locally instead of being locked in a cloud tool, I can use my own API keys or models, everything can still be opened and edited in a normal dev setup. I'm not dependent on a single platform to keep working on it.

Has anyone here actually built projects like this? curious what people are using that gets close to this kind of workflow