Are hybrid AI builders coming?

Author

Mark Bowley
October 30, 2025

I’ve tried to get on with them, but it’s just not working…

AI builders like Lovable and Bolt are great, until they aren’t. I’m not saying I don’t like them, just that it’s been frustrating so far (I’ve preferred hand coding with, AI in support). They promise flexibility, but fence you in.

It’s partly the chat interface. Like with writing, I find AI is best when it guides me and speeds me up, but doesn’t gate-keep the progress.

With tools like Lovable you describe what you want, wait for the magic to happen, but realise you can’t actually change much without time and tokens. They make it easy to get started, but hard to take control. Intensive prompting and burning tokens to fix things that could take seconds to tweak. For someone who knows how to code (a little) and design (a lot) it’s frustrating.

So I tried Raydian this week. I had been following their pre-launch with interest, and it definitely seems to have promise.

It’s part AI builder, part no-code app, part coding environment, and the switch between them is fairly seamless. It’s more of a hybrid builder. I spun up an app with one prompt, then jumped in to tinker with the styling and layout myself, both in no-code and code environments. No waiting or prompting to do some quick simple stuff.

It’s the first AI tool I’ve used that actually lets you build how you want (or the interface you want) not just describe what you’d like to build or change.  

I can see something of a blend of other tools in it, such as Figma, Bubble and Webflow. If this is where some AI creation tools are heading, it’s a good sign.

For those who can and want to tinker and adjust by hand, it will mean less prompting, more making.

What tools do you use? Do you know anything similar?

Talk soon,

Mark