Explaining to business people why building software is still hard

July 14, 2026 17.9k views Share engineering process product decisions team culture It’s 1 pm on the final day of the Hackathon, 5 hours left. For the last 2 hours, we made ZERO progress. I’m cursing the day Lovable was born. As soon as I fix one problem, another one appears, and our app is barely usable.

The start was very promising. I joined 2 engineering friends and 3 recruiters to build ‘HoneyCrew’, a smart referral system (the goal was to send a weekly summary to every employee with potential candidates from their network for our open roles. Here’s an open source version ). We decided to go with Lovable so the recruiting team can maintain it themselves later.

On the first day, we just FLEW, completing 90% of the project. Scraping, scoring, Slack integration, admin - things looked almost ready.