June 24, 2026 · 8 min read
The Cursor Takeover: How to Finish What Lovable Started
Lovable and Bolt are S-tier for the first 70%. Cursor with Claude is S-tier for the last 30%. The handoff playbook, with no credits burned.
By Launched team
You used Lovable to go from idea to clickable product in a weekend. That was the right tool. You're now trying to use Lovable to wire up a Stripe webhook and add a queue, and it's taking three days and $200. That is the wrong tool. The right move is the handoff: take the codebase into Cursor, point Claude at it, and finish the last 30% like an actual engineer.
The 70/30 split
Cloud AI builders win the first 70% of a project: the scaffolding, the UI, the happy path, the demo. They lose the last 30%: the integrations, the edge cases, the production hardening, the bug fixes that require reading three files at once. Cursor wins that 30% because it sees your whole repo, gives you diff-level control, and doesn't charge per edit.
Signals you're at the handoff point
- You're spending more time prompting than the agent is spending coding.
- Every "fix" introduces a new bug somewhere else.
- You need to read multiple files at once to reason about a change.
- You're hitting credit caps for cosmetic tweaks.
- You want to add anything stateful: queues, cron, webhooks, background jobs.
The handoff playbook
Step 1: Export and boot locally
Get the project out of the cloud builder and running on your machine. See The Ejection Trap for the survival kit.
Step 2: Initialize git and commit the baseline
Before Cursor touches anything, the current state is in git. Every Claude diff is now reviewable and revertable.
Step 3: Open in Cursor, index the codebase
Let Cursor's indexer finish. Then start with read-only prompts: "Explain how auth works in this repo." If Claude's explanation is wrong, your codebase is more tangled than you thought — refactor before you build.
Step 4: Use Claude Sonnet, not the cheapest option
For the last 30%, model quality is everything. Sonnet's longer reasoning catches the cross-file consequences the cheap models miss.
Step 5: One feature, one branch, one commit
Boring engineering hygiene. AI agents make this trivially easy and people skip it anyway. Don't.
Where Launched comes in
If the handoff itself is the daunting part, that's our default engagement. We take the export, do the handoff, finish the 30%, and hand back a clean repo. Flat fee. Book a 20-minute call. Related: Launch a Cursor project, Launch a Lovable project.