Going Past the Vibes: How to Build Real Apps [Testμ 2026]

At Testμ Conf 2026, Lovable’s Vibe Coding Engineer Lazar Jovanovic argued that AI-assisted application development should be treated less as “vibe coding” and more as a structured engineering process, based on his experience making 37,385 edits across more than 500 production-oriented apps. Organizing his presentation around the phrase “WAY PAST VIBES,” he described capabilities intended to replace ad hoc prompting and prototyping habits, including reusable skills, visual annotations, design systems, persistent project knowledge, managed secrets, integrated backend services, draft environments, MCP connectivity, app-published MCP tools, scheduled monitoring, enterprise controls, and post-launch services such as payments, email, SEO, and analytics. He emphasized that Lovable combines these functions with security scans, access restrictions, PII detection, audit logs, and deployment controls, while acknowledging that complex applications still require planning, specifications, token-budget awareness, and human judgment. In the Q&A, Jovanovic predicted more voice-driven and background agent workflows, but noted an unresolved testing limitation: while agents can create and run end-to-end tests, self-testing may miss failures that users later encounter in production.

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