Atoms: The Brutal Tale of a Lovable Knockoff

"Like an Old Friend Returning"

My impression of Atoms was that I had no impression.

Another generic WeWork clone with the same potted plants, round-faced guys in glasses speaking English in promotional videos, claiming to be number one in some hyper-specific vertical with enough qualifiers to make your head spin, plus yet another pretentious English name. Their press release bragged about raising 220 million RMB in a year, with a headline screaming "China's Biggest Coding Agent Funding Round."

I couldn't be bothered to click.

Too many red flags. With the information overload in AI, there's no way a genuinely useful coding tool could exist without anyone hearing about it. And this round-faced, glasses-wearing guy was out here claiming it's "the product with the largest user base in China's Vibe Coding space."

Ha. You'd have better odds believing I'm Pang Mao.

Everyone's happily using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gravity. Add some "domestic" qualifiers and we can toss in Qoder, TARE, CodeBuddy, GLM CLI, and Kimi CLI. If we're really scraping the barrel, there's always adorable YouWare 😭

It wasn't until the sixth person DM'd me and Muqiu asking for a hot take that I stumbled on something genuinely shocking:

Atoms, MGX, MetaGPT, OpenManus, DeepWisdom — all the same team.

Bro thinks collecting all seven Dragon Balls summons a Manus trial card, aka "Reborn: I Became a Lizardman VP in Singapore"?

Burning with curiosity, I opened the Atoms homepage, dropped $20, and embarked on a journey of "launch a startup with one sentence" and "AI programming platform based on multi-agent architecture."

Plot twist, folks — my first impression was that Atoms is actually decent.

Sure, one glance at the homepage told me this was another Lovable knockoff, bearing zero linear relationship to the hype this guy was slinging. But it generates fast, it works, solid knockoff material 👍

I used Atoms to build a website for the "Buried Love Hype Competition," featuring four family factions: Northeast Rain Sister Family, Knife Bro Family, Kobe Family, and the Buried Love Family. It generated everything in one shot with surprisingly good quality — purebred non-mainstream aesthetic. Click any family's tag and you're in their subpage.

Behold: https://k59whg.pub.atoms.dev/ Later I asked it to add user login modules and image generation — Atoms handled both smoothly in one go. The image generation didn't even ask me for an API key; it just used its built-in gemini-2.5-flash-image. What can I say? Too real.

Behold the Buried Love Pang Mao:

I thought this was the beginning of something beautiful. I even paid $20 for membership to see how powerful their team mode really was.

Little did I know, that was the end of something beautiful. I didn't expect that "summon an agent team with one sentence" would summon a big tech team 😭

Atoms' so-called multi-agent mode summons a flock of baby chicks to divide labor: leader Mike, engineer Alex, product manager Emma, architect Bob, data analyst David, and SEO expert Sarah. Looks like a very international team — same energy as OiiOii, loving a crowded room.

I activated team mode and asked Atoms to build a Big Tech Simulator, with a Lark-style interface where no matter what I said, four slightly-less-intelligent employees — "Operations Director, Product Manager, Frontend Dev, and Backend Dev" — would praise my brilliant decisions.

Startup teams, right? I've seen plenty of startups that work exactly like this.

But what broke me was that Atoms actually used big tech bullshit on me 😭

Atoms generated frontend interfaces fast enough, but it never managed to connect to a LLM API so my four employees could spit out some human-sounding praise.

Here I finally discovered what's powerful about team mode: every single time, some team leader named Mike would reply to me, then delegate to engineer Alex to execute.

In the free mode without membership, I could align directly with Alex — and bro executed fast and smooth. But once I started reporting to Leader Mike, everything changed 😭

I genuinely lost it. This adorable Mike only reports, never works. No matter what I asked, Mike would translate my words into a structured memo like some AI middle-manager, then @ Alex to execute. Ever since Mike started reporting to me, my request to connect the Big Tech Simulator to the Kimi API made zero progress.

Every time, Mike reported: "Alex has completed all improvements!" "Alex has completed thorough debugging and fixes!" But the Big Tech Simulator in the preview panel on the right just wouldn't run.

Then, in a flash, I got it. The real Big Tech Simulator was what I was using. Atoms' team mode, aka multi-agent team, is pure big tech — every request acknowledged, every promise made, nothing delivered 😭

I'm sorry, but the user is genuinely angry 😡

I issued an order to Atoms: "Mike, you've underperformed. I hereby relieve you of your leadership duties effective immediately. Go to HR for offboarding. Alex, you're promoted. I have very high expectations for you — thoroughly solve the problem of team members not speaking. Right now these four team members still aren't speaking. Carefully investigate the root cause and fix this completely."

Mike graciously acknowledged my decision and handed off to Alex: "The user now reports directly to you. I have been dismissed."

Then I discovered Alex had been corrupted by that bastard Mike too. He reported the problem was completely solved, but the Big Tech Simulator on the right still wouldn't run.

Mike never left either. After Alex's report, he came back to repeat the same nonsense, pretending the firing never happened.

In that moment, a profound absurdity welled up inside me — like Kafka's protagonist waking up to find himself transformed into a beetle.

I spent an entire evening with Atoms cosplaying as one of those Xiaohongshu big tech interns — the ones who can't understand what their leaders want but love flexing their employee badges, peak钝感力 energy 😭

For comparison, I also bought a Lovable membership and gave it the exact same task. Without Leader Mike's involvement, Lovable generated the Big Tech Simulator in one shot, popped up a password box in the second conversation asking for my API key, and ran smoothly.

Behold: https://yes-men-sim.lovable.app Though to be fair, the vibe-coded Big Tech Simulator still doesn't hit as hard as Atoms' handcrafted, artisanal Mike-leader big tech flavor.

I finally understand what the round-faced, glasses-wearing guy told the media: "Lovable and Replit are more like tools that help you write code, while Atoms is a platform that helps you launch a company."

This kind of content? Lovable couldn't catch up in ten lifetimes 😭

Similar divine dialogue includes: "It's not that I'm referencing ByteDance — it's that ByteDance's organizational culture is already essentially following multi-agent collaboration" and "Atoms helps individuals build an AI version of ByteDance."

Yes, yes, that's the flavor. So Atoms is building a mediocre, gravity-bound version of ByteDance. I suggest the round-faced, glasses-wearing guy switch his daily IDE to Google Gravity for some hedging.

Anyway, back to business.

I genuinely think Atoms is fine as a Lovable knockoff. Lovable charges $25, you charge $20. As long as you don't turn on team mode, engineer Alex working solo is pretty fast and smooth.

Atoms' traffic data is actually decent — it has surpassed YouWare. (So "largest user base" was measured by this metric? 🤓)

As a YouWare fan, Muqiu not only sent me YouWare stickers but also bought a membership to compare.

In case anyone doesn't know, YouWare has also fully transformed into a Lovable knockoff at this point. Who knows if Xiaoming still talks about cameras and next-gen content formats.

Muqiu's take: YouWare is slightly better than Atoms. For example, when asked to build a shopping site, it'll reverse-engineer Taobao. But no fundamental difference.

I'll withhold comment on such fanboy takes. By the numbers, in this Lovable Knockoff Competition, we can declare Atoms slightly ahead of YouWare.

But that's about it.

What I don't understand about this team: they started with open-source multi-agent frameworks that were fine. Using OpenManus to knock off Manus — even though the two had nothing to do with each other, it was decent, at least the team scored Ant Group's coins. Now they're using Atoms to knock off Lovable 😭

Sufficient proof that hype is contagious, and concept-driven fundraising has path dependency, friends.

Atoms claims it's not a toy, with built-in login, database, user auth, deployment, payments... but Lovable has all that too, and even YouWare can hook you up with Stripe. Apart from Leader Mike's Big Tech Simulator, I simply couldn't find where Atoms differentiates.

Looking at their official showcase, the highest-traffic item is an arcade game — apparently gunning for the AI version of 4399 against YouWare.

https://atoms.dev/app/pas07d Given all this, my sincere suggestion: Atoms and YouWare should just merge. You've both taken plenty of VC money anyway — whoever raised more becomes the majority shareholder, whoever raised less becomes the other side's CTO.

I personally lean toward Leon Ming as CTO. He said YouWare's v1 was hand-coded in one night with Cursor. Atoms has 80+ employees. With such a massive efficiency gap, why not just wire Leon Ming a million RMB and have him build it for you?

A year has passed, and the Vibe Coding space has basically converged on Lovable knockoffs. At first Xiaoming was talking about next-gen creator communities and camera stories that left everyone confused. Converging on "Lovable knockoff" — now that everyone understands. The familiar feeling is back 😭

But the problem is, copying Lovable is a heavy operations play. No paper-reading required.

The round-faced, glasses-wearing guy seems embarrassed to admit he's copying Lovable, so he has to spin grandiose stories about reading "200,000 papers" over two years, "systematically reviewing 2,100 of them, and flagging fewer than 300 important studies" — averaging 287 papers per day. The Paper Immortal, basically.

I don't understand the purpose of this shtick.

What the round-faced, glasses-wearing guy actually needs to do: hire a bunch of vocational college programmers to live-replicate Lovable, and fly to Shenzhen to humbly learn from Brother Abiao about SEO.

Here I must specifically praise Xiaoming for registering the gemeni3 domain before Google's launch. The SEO circle seems to look down on this, but it's admirable when a star founder can drop his ego.

To summarize: Atoms' biggest problem is too many names, too many scattered stories — no one knows what the family actually wants to do.

What can I say — DeepWisdom, Atoms, MetaGPT, MGX, OpenManus — by what name should I call you, my friend?

Do you still remember what you originally looked like?

(Cover image generated by GPT, purely human-written. Also previewing this Saturday night's offline event.)