Vibe Coding and AI-Built Websites: An Honest Take
You can now describe a website in plain English and watch an AI build it in front of you. "Make me a landing page, modern, with bouncy buttons and a contact form." A few seconds later, there it is. People have started calling this vibe coding, and the results can be genuinely impressive.
As a studio that builds bespoke software for a living, we are often asked whether this makes our work obsolete. The honest answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no.
What AI is genuinely good at
We use AI tools every day, and they are remarkable for some things. Spinning up a prototype, drafting a first version of a layout, exploring an idea quickly; AI has collapsed work that used to take hours into minutes.
For a simple brochure site, a personal project, or a quick proof of concept, AI-built can be perfectly good. If you need something basic online this afternoon, you have never had better options. We would not pretend otherwise.
Where the cracks appear
The trouble starts when a quick result has to become a real, dependable product. AI is very good at producing something that looks finished. It is much less reliable at producing something that is actually finished.
The gap shows up in the parts you cannot see in a demo. Does it stay fast as content grows? Is it secure when it handles real customer data? Is it accessible, maintainable, and built so the next change does not break the last one? These are the questions that separate a convincing prototype from a system a business can run on.
Looks finished versus is finished
This is the distinction that matters, and it is easy to miss. A page that renders nicely can still be quietly fragile underneath: tangled code, security holes, performance that collapses under load, edge cases that were never considered.
You often do not discover the difference until something goes wrong, usually at the worst possible moment, with real customers watching. We have rescued enough of these projects to know how expensive "it looked fine" can turn out to be. It echoes a point we have made before about the hidden cost of cheap websites.
How we actually use it
We are not anti-AI. We are the opposite. The difference is that we treat it as a tool in the hands of experienced engineers, not a replacement for them.
AI helps us move faster, explore options and handle the repetitive parts. The judgement about architecture, security, performance and long-term maintainability still comes from people who have built and supported real systems for years. That combination is far stronger than either on its own.
So should you use it?
For something small, low-stakes and short-lived, AI-built is a sensible choice and we would encourage it. For anything your business depends on, where downtime, data or reputation are on the line, the build quality underneath still matters enormously.
If you have used an AI tool to get started and now need to turn it into something solid, that is a project we know well. Contact us and we will help you work out what it takes to make it production-ready.