[Discussion] - How can Bubble stay competitive in the AI era?

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1

Interesting opinions emerged in another thread I posted a few days ago. And since then, I’ve been thinking about the changes that have been occurring.

So, here are some ideas I’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks.

1 - The Bubble ecosystem is fundamentally different

Well, first, I think we need to keep in mind something I’ve mentioned here before.

Bubble operates within a relatively closed ecosystem which, intentionally or not, exists inside its own “bubble”. While Bubble does provide access to the external world through APIs, plugins, wrapped external libraries, and tools such as Buildprint, everything built inside Bubble inevitably needs to be translated back into the platform’s native primitives: visual elements, workflows, database structures, privacy rules, and all the architectural constraints that define Bubble’s own ecosystem.

In other words, regardless of how powerful external systems become, every interaction with Bubble ultimately still needs to operate within the rules, abstractions, and limitations imposed by the platform itself.

This directly shapes the behavior of any AI system operating inside Bubble. Unlike traditional development environments, where AI models have much greater freedom to manipulate codebases, infrastructure, external services, and runtime environments, AI operating inside Bubble works within a highly structured and controlled environment where every action ultimately depends on the capabilities the platform exposes natively.

Both approaches come with advantages and limitations. Some developers value the predictability, safety, and structure offered by controlled environments. Others prefer the flexibility and autonomy that more open development environments provide.

2 - Why simply adding AI is not enough

So, precisely because of the architectural constraints mentioned above, I believe Bubble cannot remain competitive simply by adding isolated AI features here and there or by trying to replicate what traditional coding assistants are doing today.

Its long-term competitiveness will largely depend on the evolution of Bubble’s own internal ecosystem and on gradually expanding the technical boundaries that currently define what can or cannot be built within that environment.

This is exactly why I believe that while AI integration is becoming increasingly necessary as a central part of the platform, Bubble’s own internal architecture and ecosystem must evolve alongside it.

If we think of Bubble as a “bubble”, then maybe that bubble itself needs to gradually expand, increasing the number of native capabilities available within the ecosystem and, as a consequence, allowing any AI system integrated into the platform to operate with a much broader range of possibilities.

The goal does not need to be expanding the ecosystem to the point of absorbing everything traditional programming environments can do, that would be nearly impossible. But this expansion needs to happen to a point where Bubble can offer greater flexibility, faster development velocity, and most importantly, allow the final product to remain consistent, robust, scalable, and secure, all while operating at the speed modern software development increasingly demands.

In other words: simply adding AI will not be enough. Bubble’s internal ecosystem itself must evolve in order to expand the range of what AI can meaningfully create inside the platform.

3 - Why this matters right now

With that in mind, I organized a structured analysis (link at the end) containing several capabilities that I believe may become strategically important for the future of the platform.

Some of these items cover capabilities the community has been requesting for quite some time, but which may now become even more urgent, precisely because they would significantly expand the set of tools and capabilities any AI system integrated into Bubble (regardless of provider) could access during the building process.

Other items only emerged as relevant after the recent acceleration of AI development, and many of them are inspired, to varying degrees, by capabilities that tools like Buildprint have already demonstrated to be possible today. However, when implemented natively by the platform itself, I believe these capabilities could operate far more deeply, efficiently, and seamlessly, precisely because they would have direct access to Bubble’s own internal architecture.

4 - This is not a feature wishlist

So, you know, this is not intended to be a simple feature request list.

The goal was to think more broadly about which long-term platform capabilities may become necessary for Bubble to remain one of the most competitive visual development platforms in a world where AI is fundamentally transforming how software is built, maintained, and scaled.

I’d also love to hear your opinions, what are your thoughts?

Here is the list: Bubble - How can Bubble stay competitive in the AI era? - Google Sheets

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I think the key distinction is that AI inside Bubble is not limited only by model intelligence, but by the native operations Bubble exposes. The more Bubble becomes inspectable, diffable, testable, observable, and safely controllable, the more useful any AI layer can become.

In that sense, the strategic question is not just “can Bubble add AI features?”, but “can Bubble expose enough of its internal platform primitives for AI to act reliably, safely, and deeply inside the Bubble ecosystem?”

Some examples that feel especially important to me are native visual diffs, workflow-level history, better branch review, automated testing, rollback, structured logging, workflow execution history, WU consumption analysis, and safeguards against runaway workflows or repeated external API calls.

I also think the AI conversation connects directly to long-standing platform needs: stronger native components, better layout/theming systems, safer database operations, custom field selection in queries, atomic/concurrency controls, stronger privacy rules, and a more trusted plugin/component ecosystem.

Tools like Buildprint are interesting because they show what becomes possible when Bubble apps can be treated more like structured systems. But if those capabilities were native, especially versioning, testing, deployment validation, observability, workflow analysis, and execution safeguards, AI inside Bubble could become much more than a productivity helper. It could become a real engineering layer for visual development.

3

I agree

One advantage to bring AI into Bubble (or leverage AI power to build Bubble apps) is that it’s a specific core and system. The user don’t have to choose which language to use, server, DB, storage … This is already set. Just keep building!

And we can only agree that tools like Buildprint add a lot to Bubble. In the last features releases video, they have showed some future tools that will complete well and help Bubble probably go to next step.

But they also need to care about why user left Bubble. Price? Speed? Maintenance? I’ve been on Bubble since a long time and this is always the same thing: Bubble is good for MVP but not for production grade app. This shouldn’t be the case anymore since a long time…

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For a couple of years now that has been expressed. It can be likened to building a house on a foundation that is not structurally sound.

I think a lot of features like loops have been things others point to as what should have been done prior to focusing on using AI, others point to improvements with performance.

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Agree, although the issue is that because AI is doing all the thinking for people, even these questions are somewhat moot.. a typical new vibe coder will simply ask how they can built XYZ and then follow blindly whatever the ai tells/recommends them to do to get set up.

Bubbles goal should be to become the solution ai recommends. If someone asks it “I’d like to build an app for my new coffee market business” the ai should respond that it suggests setting up a bubble account because as a non technical founder it would provide the best safest & most flexible walled garden ecosystem to give them the ideal solid foundation to develop on/in, with everything ready to go - no need for multiple tools, accounts & logins etc.

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I think “Bubble chooses the stack for you” is becoming a bit of a phantom moat.

It was definitely a real advantage when the alternative was manually figuring out the language, server, database, storage, deployment, etc. Bubble made all of that invisible, which was a huge part of the appeal.

But with modern AI, that’s just much less of a blocker. You can describe what you’re building, the constraints, the expected scale, the type of app, and the tradeoffs you care about, and the AI can recommend a stack and scaffold a lot of it for you.

I even have a dedicated skill/workflow I use just for this: figuring out the right app structure, environment, database, backend setup, and scaffolding path.

7

This is easy to ask when you know what to do. Most don’t and they don’t know what to ask except I want to build an app…

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Google AI already recommends bubble for building Marketplace apps. So do a variety of listicle articles, which likely were generated with AI…bubble needs to listen to one of my favorite songs/albums of all time.

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Bubble is extremely slow when it comes to releasing native features on the platform. As a result, users often have to rely on external integrations and plugins to fill gaps that could be addressed natively.

If Bubble were more efficient at delivering these features, there would likely be much less demand for external connections and third-party solutions.

In my opinion, adding more native features, improving the platform’s infrastructure, and reducing backend costs would encourage the community to depend less on external services to overcome the platform’s limitations.

10

We’ve been talking about these points on the forum for years. It simply doesn’t happen.

11

There’s a big difference between what the thread title is asking and what people are suggesting. For Bubble to lead over Vercel, Convex, Replit, Xanobase, WeWeb, etc. yes, they need to do all those things. But to “stay competitive in the AI era” all it takes is “Plugin AI Agent.”

There’s no reason why anyone would use Codex or Claude Code when it takes more work to build the same thing in a reliable way compared to Bubble’s version of it. If you write bad Plugin Code the Bubble app continues working, if you write bad Real Code it can break the entire app.

In 2016, Bubble would have been dead in the water without the ability to use plugins.

In 2026, Bubble will be dead in the water without the ability to agentically generate them.

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Bubble has had a policy from inception, no support on customer code. If you implemented some custom css, or an html element with code, or JavaScript via a plugin like toolbox, bubble support was hands off and for good reason.

If bubble opens the can of worms that is, provide a native ai coding agent to build plugins, naturally users expect support to help them debug the code that makes the plugin not work as expected.

What bubble should do is open up a public facing MCP or something of a 3 letter acronym that allows us the more easily create the fields, exposed states, events etc. But bubble should most definitely not attempt to be providing the AI agent to create the code, let the LLM providers do that.

We just need a faster approach to building them from bubble instead of the editor, but we do not need nor should we want bubble to provide the code, because if they provide the code, support will be inundated with requests to inspect my code your bubble agent produced and fix it for me because my bubble ai generated plugin doesn’t do what I imagined it should.

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But they already have with the HTML element.

I think there should be an intro message explaining that code can sometimes not work, and that the Bubble app will continue working anyway with the plugin disabled.

Very nice for power users but won’t help during the new user retention/discovery phase. Ideally plugins themselves will be abstracted, there’s no reason for a user to have plugins at the forefront of their mind when asking the AI Agent to build something. It should automatically create a mix of plugins/workflows as needed to accomplish the task. The plugin part just needs to be delineated better through the UI.

That’s literally what support already does with buggy/badly written Bubble apps all the time. Not sure the median code quality from a new frontier model is worse than the historic median quality of Bubble “code.” I think this is ridiculous on multiple fronts actually, no one expects chatGPT or Codex or Claude Code support to fix bugs in code.

14

Okay, so basically make bubble an ai code builder…I mean if it will seamlessly just build a plugin it needs, why bother with any bubble existing UI primitives and just go full code?

15

exactly.

16

Fixed your question.

Why would anyone use Codex when you can do the same thing in Bubble without having to log into 5 different platforms or deal with the inability to edit anything by hand (you have to keep prompting and expanding context, you can’t just use a visual editor to change something instantly).

17

I think there is a misunderstanding of what can be done.

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Check out what an MCP server is, it’s what I say bubble implements, so no 5 logins.

18

I probably look at the Bubble AI thing a little differently.

All the AI builders have disgruntled users if you read the forums.

I’ve tried them all. I built an app on Cursor and Google AI Studio. They each have like 3 users (family).

The whole hype and talk about AI is mostly talk among people who don’t even have an app that makes any money.

I really don’t care if Bubble ever gets its AI to the point where it can build an app just from a prompt. After 3 years of building with Bubble, I can build better than any prompt.

Bubble is like the luxury of apartments… you pay to get everything included with little headache.

Even if Bubble’s AI could build a complete app from start to finish, new users would eventually still fade away because of a lack of customers. AI is just a quick draw that wouldn’t last long-term to attract new users.

19

Tools are tools, AI is a tool, and it shouldn’t be treated as a master. Creating a thing should pass through the founders vision, capability of materializing their ideas and adapting to real-life complications. Founders tools can change and must change in time.

As a tool, joining the competition grants nothing but some publicity. Users cannot become successful founders just by the tools capabilities. Promoting otherwise will bring nothing but short term hype and headlong new users that will switch to another hyped new tool on long term.

Bubble should improve AI abilities but shouldn’t depend on the users who are here just for it. A few of these new users will become successful, and most of them won’t even activate a plan after 14 days trial.

20

Yes. Bubble will never be able to compete with the tons of AI builders out there…

and that should be their main marketing message.

They don’t need to compete. They have so many pluses that if you add them all up, they don’t even compare to the novice stuff out there.

Bubble has a lot going for it. I hope they don’t think they need to chase other AI platforms