lovable-creditslisted

# Spending Lovable credits deliberately Credits are the real budget of a Lovable project. The difference between a balance lasting a week and lasting a month is almost never the size of the app. It is how many times the agent is asked to do something it was never given enough information to get right. ## Know what is actually free Not everything that touches the project costs credits. Before spending one, check whether a free tool answers the question. **Free, and underused:** - **Querying the database.** Reading and writing rows through the database tool costs nothing. Enormous amounts of what people ask the agent to do is really data work: fixing a bad row, checking whether a column is populated, backfilling a field, inspecting a constraint. **Do it directly.** - **Reading the code.** Listing and reading files costs nothing. You can confirm exactly what a function does before asking for a change to it. - **Reading the project's own history.** Past messages and diffs are free, and they often already contain the answer to "did we ever fix this". **Costs credits:** - Sending the agent a message, including a one-line correction. - Creating a project. The asymmetry is the whole lesson: **investigation is free, instruction is not.** Almost every wasted credit is an instruction sent before the free investigation was done. ## Never send a message you have not earned The expensive pattern is a vague request, a wrong result, a correction, another wrong result. Three messages