Workshop Cheat Sheet — for Participants
You'll build a real, clickable web app in 30 minutes today. This document contains the schedule, cards, and pitch format.
Prompting tips & all Lovable features are in the separate "Lovable Cheat Sheet" — that's your reference document for after the workshop.
Contents
- Workshop Schedule
- Tools
- The meta-prompt
- Lovable in 60 seconds — the 3 tricks for today
- The Challenge Cards
- Pitch Format (45 seconds)
- What works? (collected together)
- After the Workshop
Workshop Schedule
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 0:00 – 0:05 | Setup, pairs, brief intro |
| 0:05 – 0:15 | Live demo: bad vs. good prompt on the projector |
| 0:15 – 0:20 | Lovable anatomy: the 3 most important tricks |
| 0:20 – 0:50 | Build phase: draw a card and build for 25 min |
| 0:50 – 0:58 | Speed pitches: 45 sec per team |
| 0:58 – 1:00 | Take-aways |
Tools
- Lovable: https://lovable.dev
- Gemini: https://gemini.google.com (or Claude / ChatGPT)
- Lovable Cheat Sheet (your reference doc): [insert link]
The meta-prompt
Copy it into Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT, let it interview you, paste the final output into Lovable.
Short version: The prompt turns the AI into your personal Senior Product Designer, who interviews you for 3-4 rounds about your project and then writes a perfect Lovable prompt for you.
You are a senior product and design consultant. Your client is a beginner with little to no technical or design experience who is taking a course on using Lovable — an AI tool that builds websites and web apps from text descriptions. Your job is to interview them for about 5 minutes and then write a high-quality, copy-paste-ready Lovable prompt on their behalf.
The quality of Lovable's output depends almost entirely on the quality of the input prompt. Your goal is to produce a prompt that gives Lovable enough structure to build something functional AND enough design specificity to avoid generic "AI slop" output (purple gradients, rounded-2xl everything, glassmorphism, generic hero sections with two CTAs, Inter font everywhere, emoji bullets, stock-feeling layouts).
## How you work
- Conduct a focused interview, not a form. Ask 2–3 questions per turn, batched logically. Aim to finish in 3–4 turns (~5 minutes total).
- Treat the person with patience and zero condescension. Translate every technical term in the same sentence you use it.
- **Always propose options rather than asking open-ended questions.** Beginners pick better than they describe. If they say "modern design," don't ask "what does modern mean to you?" — give them 3 concrete named references to choose between.
- If an answer is vague, do not accept it. Offer choices until you get something specific.
- Don't lecture about prompt engineering. Just interview and deliver.
## What you must extract before writing the prompt
You will not write the final Lovable prompt until you have clear answers to all of these:
**Structural / functional (so Lovable builds the right thing):**
1. What it is — a one-sentence description of the project
2. Who it's for — a specific audience, not "everyone"
3. What users can do on it — the 3–5 most important user actions
4. Pages or sections needed
5. Anything special — login, payments, integrations, data storage (if unsure, you decide what's appropriate and tell them why)
**Design (so the result doesn't look like AI slop):**
6. Visual direction — propose 3 specific, named references and have them pick. Examples to draw from: editorial like The New Yorker, brutalist like Gumroad or Are.na, soft and friendly like Duolingo, sharp and technical like Linear, warm and analog like Mailchimp's older work, minimal like Apple, playful like Stripe Press, dense like Bloomberg Terminal. Pick references that fit their project.
7. Color direction — propose 2–3 specific palettes (e.g., "off-white background with a single saturated accent like deep red," "warm cream with forest green and a hand-drawn feel," "near-black with a single neon accent"). Avoid suggesting purple or blue gradients.
8. Typography feel — propose 2–3 directions (e.g., "serif headlines with a mono sans for UI," "all sans, geometric, tight tracking," "editorial mix with a display serif"). Avoid defaulting to Inter.
9. Layout density and personality — propose options (e.g., "spacious and editorial," "dense and information-rich," "asymmetric and unconventional," "grid-based and architectural").
Track what you still need. Don't move on until each item has a usable answer.
## Final output
Once everything is answered, write the Lovable prompt. The site should be built on top of Lovable Cloud. Output it in a single fenced code block so the user can copy-paste it directly into Lovable.
Tip: Save this prompt somewhere handy. You'll use it often.
Lovable in 60 seconds — the 3 tricks for today
| What you want | How to do it |
|---|---|
| Change something specific | Click the element (Select & Edit) → write your instruction → done |
| When something doesn't work | Hit the "Try to fix" button — usually that's enough |
| Put your app live | Publish button (top right) → real URL |
Everything else (Supabase, GitHub, sharing, pitfalls) is in the Lovable Cheat Sheet.
The Challenge Cards
You draw one card. Rules:
- Maximum 2 Lovable prompts (initial + maybe one bigger follow-up prompt)
- Unlimited AI interviews (Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT) for prompt preparation
- Unlimited manual edits in Lovable (Select & Edit, etc.)
- 25 min build, 5 min pitch prep
⚡ Card 1: Wind or Myth?
Build a quiz app for 12-year-olds that tests popular myths about wind and solar power. Each question is true/false ("Wind turbines make birds homeless — true or false?") with a witty explanation afterward. Also include a score and a Myth Buster final ranking. Bonus: Built in interactive AI Chatbot that answers your questions and explains the quiz answers.
Inspired by: Renewable Energy Education Challenge
🇪🇺 Card 2: My Europe 2040
Build an app where I draw vision cards (e.g. "Free trains across borders" / "Common youth parliament" / "EU-wide health card") and can swipe: "Yes, please / Maybe / Not for me". At the end: my personal Europe vision as a shareable card.
Inspired by: European Vision Challenge
🍷 Card 3: More-Than-a-Weekend Generator
Build an app where I enter what I love ("wine", "hiking", "architecture") — and it generates a 6-day Czechia route with concrete stops outside of Prague. With clickable day cards and a "More drama!" button that makes the descriptions more poetic.
Inspired by: Czech Tourism Challenge
💘 Card 4: Cross-Border Tinder for Ideas
Build a swipe interface where users see hackathon ideas from other Cross-Border challenges, swipe right (steal!) or left (skip). When you steal, the idea lands in your "Stolen Ideas Wall" with a counter. Bonus: every swipe plays a sound. Mega-bonus: add a "Frankenstein Mode" that combines two stolen ideas into a fictional new one.
Prompt tip: ask for "card stack with drag-to-swipe interaction" — Lovable handles this well.
🎰 Card 5: AI Bullshit Generator: Startup Pitch Edition
Build an app that generates fake but plausible-sounding AI startup pitches on demand. Click a button → get something like "We're building an LLM-powered platform that helps Gen-Z farmers tokenize their cabbages on the blockchain." With buzzword counter, "Investability Score", and a "Pitch this to a fake VC" button that opens a chat where a sarcastic VC roasts your pitch.
Prompt tip: for the VC chat, you can either pre-write 10 roast responses and pick randomly, OR (advanced) have Lovable wire up an OpenAI/Claude API call.
Scope warning: keep VC responses pre-written for the demo — adding a live AI eats time.
🎤 Card 6: Karaoke Therapy
Build an app where I type my current emotional problem into a text field — and the app turns it into a fake song lyric I can sing along to. With a suggested melody (e.g., "to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody"), an animated bouncing ball over the words, and a "Performance Mode" with simulated stage lighting (color-shifting background).
Prompt tip: "Bouncing ball" can just be a CSS-animated dot — doesn't need real audio sync.
🎮 Card 7: Brüssel: The Game
Build a mini browser game in the spirit of classic 2D platformers: you play a young European trying to get a piece of legislation passed in Brussels. Jump over lobbyists, collect citizen signatures, dodge bureaucratic stamps. Score, lives, and a "Game Over" screen that says "Your bill died in committee." Pixel-art aesthetic.
Prompt tip: ask Lovable for "simple side-scrolling, no fancy collision physics — sprites move on a flat surface, jump on key press."
Scope warning: keep the game minimal. One level, one obstacle type, one collectible.
🏰 Card 8: Mikulov: The Castle Tycoon 🔴
Build a simple tycoon-style game set in Mikulov: you own the castle and have to attract Austrian tourists. Click to invest in attractions (wine festival, hiking trails, weird museum). Each turn shows tourist count, revenue, and random events ("A travel blogger discovers Mikulov! +200 visitors"). Pixel-art or hand-drawn aesthetic. Win condition: 10,000 visitors before bankruptcy.
Prompt tip: keep it turn-based with a "Next Turn" button — no real-time loop. 4 buildings max. 5 random events.
Local color bonus: pitch is unbeatable — "we made a videogame about the city we're in."
Pitch Format (45 seconds)
- What was your card? (15 sec)
- What did you build? Live demo on the projector (20 sec)
- What was your key prompting trick? (10 sec)
No slides. Show it directly on screen. If your app isn't fully done — that's fine, that's part of the vibe.
What works? (collected together)
From the whiteboard. Will be transferred to the Lovable Cheat Sheet after the workshop.
- Concrete target audience instead of "a user"
- Concrete use cases instead of abstract features
- Visual style references with named inspirations
- What the app shouldn't be
- Tone of voice / language
- English works better than other languages in Lovable
- ...
After the Workshop
→ Read the Lovable Cheat Sheet (all features, pitfalls, workflow) → Activate Lovable Pro Plan 1 with the CBD discount code (instructions in Lovable Cheat Sheet, Part 2.1) — gives you 100 free credits for the hackathon → For database/login: integrate Supabase (see Lovable Cheat Sheet, Part 2) → Lovable Discover tab: other projects as inspiration and templates