Here's my short review after playing around with Firebase Studio for ~30 minutes. First of all, I had to turn off Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection because otherwise projects wouldn't load.
I gave it the following initial prompt:
> An app where you input a question, then flip some coins to generate an I Ching prediction, and it generates a prediction / fortune for you. Then this combination of results can be fed to Gemini AI to produce a more detailed prediction text.
It generated something that looked fine. When I input a question and press the button nothing happened. After asking it to fix the problem multiple times and having it fail, I looked at the browser console to figure out the errors it was getting. Then I copied those errors and told it to fix them. After a few iterations, it solved every error and would generate a result. It completely forgot the part where you are supposed to flip coins before getting a hexagram to generate a fortune. After a bit of prompting, I was able to get it to display the hexagram and input question. However, sometimes it becomes confused about which hexagram was generated.
Overall, my impression is that these tools are still in the toy novelty stage rather than something you'd want to use for anything important.
Here is a screenshot of the app output for the question: Will Hacker News like my vibe coded oracle? [0] As you can see, it says that the generated hexagram is 24 or 41, but in the fortune text below it says 11.
I built a complete working application (errortexts.com) using an AI tool, so I have a little insight on this.
At first, the product I was using (lovable.dev) seemed to me exactly as you described. I gave it a basic app outline and hit run, and it produced something that superficially looked right but did nothing.
So I asked some other people for advice, and they said you have to hold its hand and go step by step. So I did.
I told it, give me a landing page that matches [product description], but implement nothing else. Then, ok, let's set up auth - add a sign in and sign up dialog. Then, ok, let's create a user account page. Bit by bit.
It succeeded wildly. I was able to build the whole thing in 3 days. I'm not capable of that on my own, it would have taken me 3 weeks. Sometimes the AI got stuck and I had to manually go in and accomplish what I wanted. It took over 100 steps to complete the product, and probably around 10-20 times I had to revert its changes and give it more specific instructions. I had to check its work at every iteration, just like with a junior developer.
But it worked. And it's going to get better. Would I use this for "something important"? Depends how you define that. I used it to build a working product. Would I start letting it modify an existing mature codebase willy-nilly? No, probably not. Would I let it write cryptographic logic or trust that it wrote bulletproof code from a security standpoint in a sensitive context? No.
But for a simple application, it was an incredibly powerful tool. Especially for something that didn't even exist just 2 years ago. Give this a decade and it's going to change all our careers even more than it already has.
I put your prompt into the vibe coding tool I'm working on (shameless plug).
The first version[0] looked good, but when I inspected it I found that it just picked an I Ching prediction at random on the back-end, instead of actually flipping coins.
I updated the prompt to the following:
> Create app where you input a question, then flip coins to generate an I Ching prediction (client-side). First show the standard I Ching prediction and it's hexagram, and then use AI to generate a fortune analysis based on the prediction and your initial question.
And the result was much more laborious[1] of a UI :shrug:
The ai part of the app is basically useless. After 2 hours of “vibe coding” a chess clock flutter app I got basically nothing in the end.
It broke more and more each message. I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again.
Would not recommend anyone to use it.
Now for the non ai part: super cool. I love the nix environment. Its fascinating how they handle the previews for example. I got geekbench up and running an the cpu is a bit worse than an iphone 15 pro max, but it has 32 gigs of ram!
The app prototyping logic in Firebase Studio isn't wired up for Flutter/Dart yet. You can play with Gemini+Dart/Flutter here: https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main.
We're working with the Firebase Studio team to integrate. FWIW, it seems to do fairly well with "Create a chess clock app".
After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt.
YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"
As a person currently working on a project that uses Firestore (the db component of Firebase), there is one thing - and only one thing - I want.
A web GUI for Firestore that lets me work on documents like, idk, any other DBMS GUI would: the ability to select multiple records, and operate on them.
That's literally it. I don't need AI, I don't need dark mode, I don't even need MongoDB compatibility. I just want to select multiple documents with my mouse and do things to them.
For me the biggest missing block is the text search API. It's ridiculous that you can't add a basic search input to your Firebase-based website unless you use TypeSense, Algolia or some other additional database that you have to manage and keep in sync.
Despite all the recent enshitification, I can't think of any alternative solution that would come even close to what Firebase has to offer. Authentication API is especially hard to beat (cheap and very easy to integrate).
First off, this looks really cool and I'm excited to see more things like this.
The overall chat in the HN conversation has got me thinking, though.
Around 7 years ago in my career, one of my most common actions for one-off scripts was for me to create a WinForms application with, often, a couple text boxes and a "Run" button of some sort.
The text boxes would be the inputs and the run button would ... run. There was also often like a text output or bunch of loglines or something. I wrote almost exclusively in C# at the time, so it was a way to shove a bunch of C# code into place and test it.
I did this for random and arbitrary things I needed to process or solve, a lot like how I used Python or Ruby in the future.
I bet it's actually pretty common for people to need "a script that does a thing", and I think, maybe, that's where a lot of the AI scripting of the most immediate use is going to be. If it can be a familiar interface for people to build (in the past, the IDE) and a familiar or simple place to interact with the generated script (the WinForms + buttons), these programs to generate scripts and do "stuff" could likely spread pretty wide.
I think Jupyter Notebooks are another example of this, another precursor, of sorts?
That's one use case where LLMs really help me, one-off scripts where I know exactly what I need done, know it's possible but would take me much longer to brush off my Bash, Python, etc. skills to write it. Give the LLM a prompt, let it write the scaffolding, do the tweaks I need, and iterate over with the LLM if I forgot how exactly it was to write a for-loop in Bash.
Software engineers, who are the most skilled in terms of holding ai's hand to create a product, should be cloning every single saas out there and making money by eating a share of the market. AI is a great way for engineers to become founders. Let's bring the competition.
5 years working at startups has taught me that go-to-market is almost always the most important function. There are very few truly novel spaces and apps. You can clone whatever you want, but you'll get nowhere without a solid GTM.
I was excited to try this out because I've had a lot of trouble getting the Supabase integrations to work on Lovable and Bolt.new.
Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4.
Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.
this isn't new.. (edit, well actually they've added the "prompt from scratch" thingy like v0.dev/replit/lovable that idx.dev didn't have before) wasn't really gaining the traction they wanted so decided to rebrand. not a bad idea. I use idx.dev (now firebase.studio) and like it. They may not have a "template" for the exact stack/app type you are working with, but it's pretty easy to just setup a blank workspace and modify the nix.dev file as needed..
Here's a dev.nix file that works for FastHTML, which is a little tricky to get the preview working but using this dev.nix it works out of the box. Would probably work with any Starlette or Uvicorn based app as well (obviously make sure you have requirements.txt in order).
I tried this on Mobile Safari and it clearly wasn't designed with mobile in mind, then when it got to the preview your app screen the preview panel was blank (it worked when I switched to Firefox on macOS).
I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing!
They're trying to get in on the AI IDE / AI coding land rush so they don't have to acquire one of the leaders later. Or get blocked from acquiring one for antitrust reasons. Winning a chunk of this space feels like a major chess move that enables a lot of market optionality.
Google and Microsoft both have web IDEs, so it's a natural product evolution for these (though Microsoft's Github is much better positioned with its deep distribution and integrations).
It still feels like these are so far behind Cursor and Zed and the like in terms of getting real work done, but maybe the customer is new or non-engineers.
I haven't looked at startups like Replit. Are they even in this game?
And then there are the end-to-end products like Vercel's V0, Lovable, Bolt, etc. If they can get past the 80% problem, they might be a huge deal.
The final result is very poor. Google looks like Hooli with chaotic management. The design has lost its aesthetics, and the gradient color is very ugly.
However, the aistudio updated today is good.
So it seems that the output is so different because the person in charge is different?
From this perspective, there is no hope for Firebase, because the person in charge has poor management logic. even with the best resources in the world, it doesn't help
About the editor, do they allow Flutter development in a Monaco stack? Last time I checked, it was tied to their Intellij-based IDE which needs regular force updates.
About the executables, are backend apps running on a temporary VM which can run Postgres etc? Does the Android emulator launch from web?
Firebase Studio is an agentic, cloud-based development environment that gives you powerful tools and AI agents directly in your browser. With Firebase Studio, you can prototype, build, test, publish, and iterate on full-stack AI apps from a single place.
I admit, this comment did a lot better at Buzzword Bingo compared to my attempt in ChatGPT: ("Give me a two sentence marketing pitch for Firebase Studio")
"Firebase Studio is a powerful visual development platform that lets you build, customize, and deploy full-featured apps with the speed of low-code and the flexibility of Firebase. Whether you're prototyping or scaling to millions of users, Firebase Studio streamlines your workflow with real-time data, seamless backend integration, and built-in hosting."
Currently I would not invest in any solution that enforces usage of a single LLM model provider, as the scene is really dynamic with the best player changing every month. Now Gemini 2.5 looks really great, but Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek and others are probably working on the next, better model.
So, Aider + whatever seems to be working best, seems to be the best strategy that works for me. Aider has this nice feature that I can specify what files are added to the context, so I pay less and I do not confuse AI with stuff unrelated to a given task.
It makes the most sense (to me) for app platforms like Firebase to invest deeply in the AI application development wave. Creating something from scratch with prompts is impressive but the gap between something that works locally to something that people can use is still large enough to require some dev & ops expertise.
This looks very much like Replit. I like Replit, built a bunch of hobby projects mostly for myself, even though some of them are deployed and publicly accessible.
You will inevitably run into some doom loops, but we're still at the beginning. These things will probably be super powerful in 2 years time.
I’m a teacher, so different than most folks posting here. I have a little coding experience, but it’s definitely not my thing professionally. I just made several utility apps with this that I’ll be using in the classroom.
Asked FBS for a simple web form, it immediately went with NextJS, TailwindCSS and a whole bunch of build tools. Ask it again to change it to vanilla JavaScript, now it's stuck in an infinity loop... bad vibes : (
Can't we just have an AI that runs like a window manager? I.e. it has access to all apps on my desktop. And it can help me coding, but it can also help me write documents, draw stuff, edit photos and videos, etc.
That's the holy grail, my friend. Whoever succeeds will be the successor of 90s Microsoft (OS) and 00's Google (Internet/Search) in creating a unified platform which your grandmother associates as being "the computer". I fear that all the major players are trying exactly that (which is the reason why no one tries to be just a foundation model supplier). Some have the Hardware (Apple) but lack the software execution, others have the software (OpenAI) but lack the Hardware.
Apple seems to agree that that would be the ideal UX for AI, but for any computer, (1) it's going to require massive rework at the OS level, and (2) app developers have to be willing to integrate with the OS-level AI. I'm not sure that the latter is happening since profit incentives much better align with walled gardens.
Similar experience, generated code confidently, manually had to copy paste it in places, only to find out not only it is bad but even the code was terribly structured / random gibberish sometimes.
TheAceOfHearts|10 months ago
I gave it the following initial prompt:
> An app where you input a question, then flip some coins to generate an I Ching prediction, and it generates a prediction / fortune for you. Then this combination of results can be fed to Gemini AI to produce a more detailed prediction text.
It generated something that looked fine. When I input a question and press the button nothing happened. After asking it to fix the problem multiple times and having it fail, I looked at the browser console to figure out the errors it was getting. Then I copied those errors and told it to fix them. After a few iterations, it solved every error and would generate a result. It completely forgot the part where you are supposed to flip coins before getting a hexagram to generate a fortune. After a bit of prompting, I was able to get it to display the hexagram and input question. However, sometimes it becomes confused about which hexagram was generated.
Overall, my impression is that these tools are still in the toy novelty stage rather than something you'd want to use for anything important.
Here is a screenshot of the app output for the question: Will Hacker News like my vibe coded oracle? [0] As you can see, it says that the generated hexagram is 24 or 41, but in the fortune text below it says 11.
[0] https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png
windowshopping|10 months ago
At first, the product I was using (lovable.dev) seemed to me exactly as you described. I gave it a basic app outline and hit run, and it produced something that superficially looked right but did nothing.
So I asked some other people for advice, and they said you have to hold its hand and go step by step. So I did.
I told it, give me a landing page that matches [product description], but implement nothing else. Then, ok, let's set up auth - add a sign in and sign up dialog. Then, ok, let's create a user account page. Bit by bit.
It succeeded wildly. I was able to build the whole thing in 3 days. I'm not capable of that on my own, it would have taken me 3 weeks. Sometimes the AI got stuck and I had to manually go in and accomplish what I wanted. It took over 100 steps to complete the product, and probably around 10-20 times I had to revert its changes and give it more specific instructions. I had to check its work at every iteration, just like with a junior developer.
But it worked. And it's going to get better. Would I use this for "something important"? Depends how you define that. I used it to build a working product. Would I start letting it modify an existing mature codebase willy-nilly? No, probably not. Would I let it write cryptographic logic or trust that it wrote bulletproof code from a security standpoint in a sensitive context? No.
But for a simple application, it was an incredibly powerful tool. Especially for something that didn't even exist just 2 years ago. Give this a decade and it's going to change all our careers even more than it already has.
jumploops|10 months ago
The first version[0] looked good, but when I inspected it I found that it just picked an I Ching prediction at random on the back-end, instead of actually flipping coins.
I updated the prompt to the following:
> Create app where you input a question, then flip coins to generate an I Ching prediction (client-side). First show the standard I Ching prediction and it's hexagram, and then use AI to generate a fortune analysis based on the prediction and your initial question.
And the result was much more laborious[1] of a UI :shrug:
[0]https://iching.magicloops.app
[1]https://iching2.magicloops.app
tymscar|10 months ago
It broke more and more each message. I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again. Would not recommend anyone to use it.
Now for the non ai part: super cool. I love the nix environment. Its fascinating how they handle the previews for example. I got geekbench up and running an the cpu is a bit worse than an iphone 15 pro max, but it has 32 gigs of ram!
vsmenon|10 months ago
The app prototyping logic in Firebase Studio isn't wired up for Flutter/Dart yet. You can play with Gemini+Dart/Flutter here: https://dartpad.dev/?channel=main.
We're working with the Firebase Studio team to integrate. FWIW, it seems to do fairly well with "Create a chess clock app".
jen_h|10 months ago
But try this:
Open up a blank Flutter template in Studio: https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter
After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt.
YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"
lenerdenator|10 months ago
A web GUI for Firestore that lets me work on documents like, idk, any other DBMS GUI would: the ability to select multiple records, and operate on them.
That's literally it. I don't need AI, I don't need dark mode, I don't even need MongoDB compatibility. I just want to select multiple documents with my mouse and do things to them.
beAbU|10 months ago
Come up with your data model, explain it to the AI, and tell it to give you a CRUD for it.
I'm pretty sure it's perfectly doable to ask it to give you a dynamic crud based on the "shape" of the data in Firestore.
Sadly it's an internal tool for work, so I can't share.
ohadron|10 months ago
jarek-foksa|10 months ago
Despite all the recent enshitification, I can't think of any alternative solution that would come even close to what Firebase has to offer. Authentication API is especially hard to beat (cheap and very easy to integrate).
miserve|10 months ago
hndamien|10 months ago
kfarr|10 months ago
efxzsh|10 months ago
sadeshmukh|10 months ago
t-writescode|10 months ago
The overall chat in the HN conversation has got me thinking, though.
Around 7 years ago in my career, one of my most common actions for one-off scripts was for me to create a WinForms application with, often, a couple text boxes and a "Run" button of some sort.
The text boxes would be the inputs and the run button would ... run. There was also often like a text output or bunch of loglines or something. I wrote almost exclusively in C# at the time, so it was a way to shove a bunch of C# code into place and test it.
I did this for random and arbitrary things I needed to process or solve, a lot like how I used Python or Ruby in the future.
I bet it's actually pretty common for people to need "a script that does a thing", and I think, maybe, that's where a lot of the AI scripting of the most immediate use is going to be. If it can be a familiar interface for people to build (in the past, the IDE) and a familiar or simple place to interact with the generated script (the WinForms + buttons), these programs to generate scripts and do "stuff" could likely spread pretty wide.
I think Jupyter Notebooks are another example of this, another precursor, of sorts?
piva00|10 months ago
hnlurker22|10 months ago
CharlieDigital|10 months ago
siva7|10 months ago
the_king|10 months ago
Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4.
Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.
indigodaddy|10 months ago
indigodaddy|10 months ago
https://community.firebasestudio.dev/t/working-fasthtml-a-ne...
g42gregory|10 months ago
simonw|10 months ago
I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing!
jerpint|10 months ago
Curious what kind of phone apps you’ve been using to do vibe coding, I suppose it auto deploys stuff also?
kylecazar|10 months ago
echelon|10 months ago
Google and Microsoft both have web IDEs, so it's a natural product evolution for these (though Microsoft's Github is much better positioned with its deep distribution and integrations).
It still feels like these are so far behind Cursor and Zed and the like in terms of getting real work done, but maybe the customer is new or non-engineers.
I haven't looked at startups like Replit. Are they even in this game?
And then there are the end-to-end products like Vercel's V0, Lovable, Bolt, etc. If they can get past the 80% problem, they might be a huge deal.
This is going to be quite the battle.
irjustin|10 months ago
TiredOfLife|10 months ago
m3kw9|10 months ago
the_king|10 months ago
if firebase studio can make a todo app, i'd be surprised. this is the worst "vibe coding" tool i've ever used.
sumitkumar|10 months ago
https://firebase.google.com/docs/gemini-in-firebase#:~:text=...
chaosprint|10 months ago
However, the aistudio updated today is good.
So it seems that the output is so different because the person in charge is different?
From this perspective, there is no hope for Firebase, because the person in charge has poor management logic. even with the best resources in the world, it doesn't help
alittletooraph2|10 months ago
aitchnyu|10 months ago
About the executables, are backend apps running on a temporary VM which can run Postgres etc? Does the Android emulator launch from web?
munificent|10 months ago
sumitkumar|10 months ago
bdcravens|10 months ago
"Firebase Studio is a powerful visual development platform that lets you build, customize, and deploy full-featured apps with the speed of low-code and the flexibility of Firebase. Whether you're prototyping or scaling to millions of users, Firebase Studio streamlines your workflow with real-time data, seamless backend integration, and built-in hosting."
piokoch|10 months ago
So, Aider + whatever seems to be working best, seems to be the best strategy that works for me. Aider has this nice feature that I can specify what files are added to the context, so I pay less and I do not confuse AI with stuff unrelated to a given task.
neural_thing|10 months ago
Also, the system prompt encourages it to use Genkit, so it tried to add AI to an email sending function...
beezlewax|10 months ago
aamederen|10 months ago
indigodaddy|10 months ago
josefrichter|10 months ago
You will inevitably run into some doom loops, but we're still at the beginning. These things will probably be super powerful in 2 years time.
tamad|10 months ago
rambojohnson|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
sexy_seedbox|10 months ago
amelius|10 months ago
siva7|10 months ago
rTX5CMRXIfFG|10 months ago
varispeed|10 months ago
Is that possible?
Billings systems seems to be so opaque and complex.
and can it learn my private keys and then expose them to someone else?
atomicnature|10 months ago
I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while.
Was procrastinating.
Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins.
Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason):
https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix...
No frustration whatsoever
Their prototyper is awesome
And code mode also great
I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.
kaishiro|10 months ago
oulipo|10 months ago
antouank|10 months ago
bpiroman|10 months ago
dankobgd|10 months ago
romanovcode|10 months ago
- Add SSR (fail)
- Give the correct command to add SSR (success)
- Add i18n (fail)
- Retries like 6 times, completely messes angular.json file up to no recovery, project doesn't even build
Outputs: It seems I am running circles, I cannot help you with that.
Wow, AI will really replace developers soon. /s
rockyj|10 months ago
sam1234apter|10 months ago