Vibe coding is real, it's mainstream and you genuinely can build a website with it. Here's an honest look at when it works, when it doesn't and what it means for your business.
Honest question. Fair question. And if you've spent any time online in 2026, you've almost certainly heard the term floating around. Vibe coding. Cursor. Lovable. Bolt. Tools that promise you can describe a website in plain English and watch it appear in minutes, no developer required.
So why would you hire someone like me when you could just... do it yourself?
It's a genuinely good question and you deserve a genuinely honest answer. Not a defensive one designed to protect my business. An actual answer.
Vibe coding is the ability to build software - including websites - by describing what you want in plain language to an AI tool. You don't write code. You write a prompt. The AI writes the code. You refine with more prompts until it looks roughly how you imagined.
The term was coined in early 2025 by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, and it's moved from niche developer conversation to mainstream reality faster than almost anything in tech. By 2026, 75% of all new software applications are being built with low-code or AI-assisted tools. Lovable - one of the leading vibe coding platforms - reached £100 million in annual revenue in just eight months. This isn't hype. People are genuinely building real things with it.
And here's the part where I'm supposed to panic and tell you it's terrible. I'm not going to do that.
If you need a quick prototype to show a potential investor. A one-page landing page to test a new offer. A simple internal tool for your team. A personal portfolio to get your work out there fast. Vibe coding can be genuinely excellent for all of those.
63% of people using vibe coding tools in 2026 identify as non-developers. They're business owners, marketers, creatives and entrepreneurs who want to build something without a technical background. For fast, low-stakes projects, the democratisation of building is genuinely exciting.
I use AI tools every single day in my work. Claude Code, Cursor, Midjourney. They make me faster and better at what I do. I'm not threatened by the tools. I'm powered by them.
Here's where the honest answer gets important. If your website is the primary way customers find and evaluate your business, "rough" isn't good enough.
AI can generate a functional website. It cannot generate a brand. It doesn't know your story, your customers, your positioning or what makes you worth choosing over the competition. It will give you something that looks competent but generic - and in a market where design quality is a trust signal, generic is a problem.
Vibe coded sites are almost never built with SEO in mind. The structure, the metadata, the speed optimisation, the content strategy - these require deliberate decisions that go far beyond "make a website about my restaurant." A beautiful site that Google can't find is an expensive hobby.
Getting people to your website is half the job. Turning them into customers is the other half. The layout, the copy, the calls to action, the user journey - these are the result of experience and strategic thinking, not prompt engineering. An AI can build a page. It can't figure out why visitors aren't booking.
Vibe coded sites live on platforms you don't fully own or understand. When something breaks - and it will - the AI's fix for your fix creates a new problem. Over time you accumulate technical debt that costs more to untangle than building properly from the start.
Not "can I vibe code my website?" - clearly you can. The real question is: what is this website worth to my business?
If it's a side project or an experiment, vibe code away. Seriously. Have fun with it.
If it's the thing that determines whether someone chooses you or the business across the street - if it's the first impression you make on every potential customer, the thing that shows up when someone Googles your name at 11pm deciding whether to call you in the morning - then it deserves the same seriousness you'd bring to any other investment in your business.
The tools are remarkable. But remarkable tools in the wrong hands still produce the wrong results. I use the same AI tools everyone else has access to - the difference is fifteen years of design experience, a deep understanding of what converts and a genuine interest in building something that works for your specific business.
If you want to talk through what the right approach looks like for your situation - vibe coded, professionally built or somewhere in between - get in touch. I'm always up for an honest conversation.
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