Vibe Coding Your Website: Not D-I-Why, but D-I-When

By Kiefer Slaton, Web Development Director

Web and software developers aren’t magicians.

We’re really, really close to magicians but there’s one critically important difference: We don’t mind revealing our tricks. Since software development began, one of its guiding principles has been to give the power to anyone willing to learn to wield it. To that end, many of the most widely used tools, packages, and frameworks in the development world are completely open-source, meaning that the package developer offers it for free. This is despite likely having spent hundreds to thousands of hours building and refining it. 

I guarantee you that your favorite app or website stands on the shoulders of hundreds, if not thousands of these open-source tools. 

Many of these tools aren’t just geared towards developers though. WordPress, the most widely used web blog platform in the world (and what this site is built on, by the way), is completely free. Its intent is to give everyday business owners or personal bloggers an avenue to stand up a site without needing their own personal nerd to write a bunch of code for them. You just download it, find a host and domain, pick a theme you like, and you can start creating content. 

Several very low-cost WordPress competitors like Squarespace or Webflow aim to make this process even easier by offering drag-and-drop page building that is sufficient for many small business or personal websites. 

Recently, the public has even greater access to web development tools and techniques through LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude. If you want something a little more unique than what a page builder like Squarespace can offer, it is a very real and available option to ask your favorite LLM to help you build a website. This works even if you have little to no development experience. 

The practice of using an LLM to help build a website, which is affectionately called “vibe coding” in the dev community, has produced various success stories of novice programmers opening a tool like Cursor AI and creating cool projects. Some have even begun to wonder if programming is a dying profession, soon to be replaced entirely by AI prompting that can generate a completely custom site or app in a matter of hours.

As an avid user of these AI coding tools myself, I can attest that they bring a lot of value to the table when used properly and responsibly. However, their limitations in broader reasoning can leave a ton of gaps in critical projects. It’s important to understand which projects are a good fit for AI-led development and to know where it may lead to disappointing or dangerous results.

Good Vibes Ahead

Here are some examples of web and app projects where AI will likely excel.

Simple, Templated Brochure Sites

These are the kind of sites you may find on Squarespace or the WordPress theme marketplace. Because LLMs have a massive bank of “standard websites” they can use as examples, they’re exceptional at building new projects that follow a similar template. If you need a basic web presence and want to stand up a landing page with a little effort and very little cost, ChatGPT or Claude Code are great tools. 

Personal App Projects

I have a garage gym and I’ve found myself pretty disappointed in the options for weight training apps that specifically target the equipment I have available. So, I opened Claude Code one evening and asked it to write me one. I eventually found something I liked better on the App Store, but in the interim it was a very personalized and effective tool that took a few hours one evening to put together. 

We have had similar success building internal tools for the web team to help us with anything from time tracking to spinning up new WordPress projects. Because these apps stay on your local machine and don't have significant privacy or performance considerations, they’re a fun way to experiment and develop personalized solutions for managing work or life. I recommend Next.js as an accessible starter framework to play with app development. 

More Ambitious Design Projects (If You’re Patient)

If you have a clear artistic vision and your web project is frontend only (meaning you don’t intend to have user logins or collect user data), enough time with your LLM of choice can get you there. You can easily judge pass/fail based on how the website looks and compares to your vision. 

Fair warning: these models often struggle to translate design requests, so you should expect this to take time and effort.

The Vibes Are Off

There are a couple of areas where you need to be cautious about trusting AI to write code for you.

Projects With a Ton of Users

Website and app performance is an under-the-surface thing that is regularly taken for granted but it accounts for 40–50% of the work on certain projects, especially those that have to sustain large user bases. When evaluating performance, it’s important to know exactly where to look and what tools to use. An experienced developer who specializes in optimizing apps or sites can typically pinpoint bottlenecks right away, while ChatGPT will struggle to find an appropriate entry point. 

Websites that Transmit or Store Personal Data

Similar to performance, security is a “you don’t know what you don’t know” area of development where you can really step into some danger zones without the benefit of some experience to guide you. There are dozens of different vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit on public websites, and it’s unlikely that an LLM will catch them all unless you know specifically what to ask for. An experienced developer will come equipped with the right tools and knowledge to plug the appropriate holes.

Projects That Are Starting Small but Are Expected to Grow

Building a custom development project has many of the same steps and concepts as building a house. Similar to building a house, your options for customization drop precipitously once the foundation is poured. If you’re building a website or app for a business that you intend to grow, it’s better to enlist an experienced development team to pour you a solid foundation. A good team can help you understand where to put in effort early and where you will have opportunities to graft on features later without compromising the core functionality. 

For most people, this is a gut decision.

You know what you or your business need and whether it’s worth the investment to enlist some expert help or if it’s something you can navigate yourself with the help of an AI assistant, page builder, or both. What’s important is that you understand the trade-offs and consequences so you can make a good decision early on.

Despite the optimistic marketing around AI-assisted tools, they still have significant limitations and should be approached with caution when privacy, security, or your business’s performance is on the line.