How to fix the AI look in Lovable, Bolt and v0

Lovable, Bolt and v0 get you to a working site faster than anything before them. They also get you to a site with a certain look. Reviewers tend to rate Lovable's defaults as slightly more finished than Bolt's, but both land on a recognisable AI-app style that needs a design pass of its own.

Why they look alike

They run into the same problem as any model, and they add a layer of their own. A builder has defaults for padding, font sizes and colours, plus component kits that many others share. When your prompt describes what the site does and says nothing about how it should look, that's what you get.

Fix spacing and type first

One reply we keep coming back to, on a thread about touching up a Bolt page, says that the AI-generated feeling comes from spacing and typography far more than layout. That matches what we see. You usually don't need new sections, just better ones.

Prompts that change something

• Instead of "make it modern": name a font, a type scale and how tight the headline should be.
• Instead of "make it pop": give it two or three named colours and say what each one is for.
• Instead of "add more space": give section padding as a number, and a maximum text width.
• Audit before you edit: ask it to list spacing, hierarchy and contrast problems in one section, then fix those only.
• Cut as well as add: ask what can be removed from the hero. Builders tend to leave too much empty space above the fold, and too many elements in it.

Give it a real reference

One third-party test of these tools found the results stayed fairly random without a visual reference. A named site gives the model a target. Describe what you want to take from it, such as the type and the spacing, rather than asking for a copy.

Better still, connect a tool that gets the real values. Lovable's docs say custom MCP servers are available on all its plans, connected from Connectors in chat. Replit, v0 and Bolt have their own routes for this, and each changes often enough that it's worth checking their docs.

Export, or stay in the builder?

Some people take the code out and finish it in Cursor, Codex or Claude Code, and that makes sense once the changes get fine-grained. Builders are at their best when you're moving quickly and worst when you're adjusting a few pixels. It's a matter of what you're doing that day, and there's no need to choose forever.

Where plagio fits

We make plagio, an MCP server that reads a public page in a real browser and returns its markup, tokens, hover states and motion, so a builder that supports MCP can work from measurements. We've read each builder's docs but haven't tested every one live, so try it on one page before you depend on it.