Are AI web app builders still worth using in 2026, or was the hype mostly prototype magic?

I keep going back and forth on AI web app builders. A year or 2 ago, the pitch felt obvious: describe an app, get a working prototype, skip weeks of boilerplate, maybe even launch without needing a full dev team. Now in 2026, the space feels crowded and harder to judge. I keep seeing names like Lovable, Bolt.new, Replit Agent, v0, Cursor, Bubble, Base44, Wix/Webflow-style AI builders, and a bunch of smaller “vibe coding” tools. They all seem impressive in demos. The part I can’t tell is which ones actually hold up once the app needs real auth, database logic, payments, permissions, edge cases, debugging, maintainability, and code ownership. It feels like almost every tool can make a nice first version now. But maybe the real question is what happens after that first version. Do you stay inside the builder? Export the code? Move to Cursor or Claude Code? Rebuild manually once the idea is validated? Use these tools only for prototypes and landing pages? Or are people actually shipping serious production apps with them now? I’m also wondering if this category is still growing or if the hype has started to cool down. From the outside, it feels popular, but also noisy. Every week there’s a new “build an app in 5 minutes” demo, and every week someone else says they hit a wall the moment the app became more complex. For people actively using AI web app builders in 2026: which companies/tools are actually worth paying attention to? And more importantly, are these tools still useful after the prototype stage, or are they mostly a faster way to discover what you’ll need to rebuild properly later?