In June last year, it announced that it had acquired Base44, a vibe-coding startup, for $80 million. In January, it announced the launch of Wix Harmony, an "AI website builder that merges human and artificial intelligence."This comes as the industry is warning of a "SaaSpocalypse," in which AI threatens the business models of companies like Workday, Salesforce, and Asana. Wix's share price is down about 23% since the start of the year, partly on these fears.Wix's head of product, Yaara Asaf, told Business Insider that Wix Harmony is for "anyone who wants to create a web presence; no website-building experience, technical or design background required."Lovable's design head, Nad Chishtie, told Business Insider that Lovable "empowers the 99% of people with no technical skills to build whatever idea they have in their head, just by talking to AI."I tested Wix Harmony to see whether Wix's two decades of website-building expertise gave it an edge over Lovable, a 2023-founded startup.LovableLovable generated a near-perfect website from the first prompt.Aditi BharadeI've used Lovable before to create a virtual newsroom photo coach, so I already knew this would be a simple process.I threw in my first prompt, asking the platform to generate a clean, no-frills website with my headshot and bio on the homepage, and five sections — breaking news, careers, tech and AI, cultural trends, and retail — where I could post my choice of stories.It nailed the brief, giving me almost exactly what I needed.

The homepage features only a simple headshot, the title "Jane Doe: Journalist, Reporter, Writer," and a placeholder bio. The website was split into five sections, each with three article cards populated with dummy stories.Here's where I ran into my first issue — how do I edit the text? I expected a Canva-like interface where I could double-click the text box to enter my content, but Lovable didn't work that way.When I asked the chatbot what to do, it told me to either edit the code or paste all the edits into the chat, and it would make the changes for me.I don't have coding expertise, so I fed it a massive 700-word prompt, instructing it on all the headlines, subheads, and article links to the 15 stories I wished to spotlight in my portfolio.

It processed the request seamlessly.Then I realized the article cards were missing thumbnails. I asked if it could pull the thumbnails from my Business Insider articles in the correct dimensions. No problemo.Lovable could seamlessly populate the article cards with my input.Aditi BharadeThen all that was left was plonking my LinkedIn bio into the homepage, asking it to pull my headshot from my author page, and updating my contact info.Just as I processed the final tweak, my daily free credits ran out.

I cut it a bit close, but at the end of the roughly 20 minutes it took to make the website, I had a very usable digital portfolio.Needless to say, I was impressed.Wix HarmonyI was not too impressed with Wix's vibe-coded website design.Aditi BharadeI had high hopes for Wix Harmony. The first website I ever built, way back when I was in my high school's photography club, was a digital photo repository on Wix.But when I put the same prompt into Wix Harmony and saw the website it created on the first try, I sighed.It looked like all the elements were pulled from a basic PowerPoint template, with no consideration given to text alignment.It auto-generated an image of a quill as the website's logo, which I can't fault, but it felt slightly on the nose.

The headshot was an AI-generated image of a South Asian woman.But the worst part was that Wix didn't create five distinct sections for my story types. Instead, it lumped all the story cards into the homepage and hallucinated two unnecessary sections called "Blog" and "Portfolio page."When I prompted it to correct that mistake, it gave me a list of five steps to fix the problem myself: "Follow these steps to restructure your website and align the content properly.""Can't you do it?" I asked Wix. It then gave me another set of options, including one to contact Wix support.As a last-ditch attempt, I asked Wix to regenerate the site, thinking it might be easier to start afresh than fix all the issues mys