Vibe coding, and when it should not build your website.
Vibe coding is describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write the code. It is genuinely useful, we use it every day, and it is not the same thing as having a website you can run a business on. These pages explain the difference without pretending the tools are worse than they are.
Where we stand
Anyone can prompt. The difference is five years and a strategy.
Some studios sell AI as the whole answer, and some pretend they do not touch it. Neither is honest. We use the same tools you could open this afternoon. What we bring to them is five years of building websites for other people, watching what happened to those sites afterwards, and a strategy session that decides what this business says that its competitors cannot.
Five years of sites that had to work
We have built and launched websites for real businesses for five years, then watched them in the wild: which pages earned enquiries, where visitors gave up, what the client actually needed changed three months later. That is knowledge you cannot prompt for, and it is what we bring to the tools.
Strategy is what makes it yours
A model answers with the average of everything it has read, which is why AI-built sites feel interchangeable. We start with a half day deciding who the site is for, what expensive problem the business solves and what it can say that nobody else can. The build then serves that one thing.
The tools are real
Cursor, Claude Code and Codex genuinely changed how fast a competent developer works. A week-long build is a week because of the thinking, the decisions and the review, not because someone is typing slowly.
The first draft is not the site
AI produces something that runs. Whether it is accessible, fast on a phone, secure, indexable and maintainable by whoever comes next are separate questions, and they are the ones that decide if a website earns anything.
Someone has to be accountable
When a form silently stops sending, or the site drops out of search, or a dependency needs patching, the question is who fixes it. A prompt history is not a person.
You own the code either way
Everything we build is yours: the repository, the domain, the hosting account. If you want to take it to another developer, or carry on with the AI yourself, nothing stops you.
The site builders are a layer you do not need
Lovable, Bolt, v0 and the rest wrap a model in hosting and a subscription. The same models, reached through professional tools, build into a repository you own with no lock-in and no ceiling. For a business website the platform adds a dependency and takes away control, which is why we do not use them and do not put clients on them.
Direction before generation
Four briefs. Four different answers.
AI can accelerate production. It cannot decide which visual argument your audience needs. These concepts show what changes when the offer—not the tool—sets the direction.
Concept 01The executive coach
Authority, consultation and a booked call
Concept 02The ROI calculator
Paid traffic, qualification and an instant answer
Concept 03The premium service
High-value enquiries and visual confidence
Concept 04The industry report
Lead capture, data and a gated download
These are fictional design concepts created to show range, not client work or off-the-shelf templates. Every live page is directed around the offer, audience and action in its brief.
Where it works
Use it here, and it will save you weeks.
Vibe coding is at its best where being wrong is cheap and the code is short-lived. If a mistake costs you an afternoon rather than a customer, let the AI run.
- Proving an idea before you spend real money on it. A rough working version beats a deck.
- Internal tools that only your team uses: a calculator, a dashboard, a script that tidies a spreadsheet every Monday.
- One-off jobs. Rename four hundred files, reshape a CSV, pull numbers out of a stack of invoices.
- Learning. Reading code an AI wrote about a problem you understand is a fast way to get better.
- Throwaway prototypes to show a developer what you mean, which is worth more than three paragraphs of description.
Where it fails
Avoid it here, and you will save yourself a rebuild.
The failure mode is not that the site looks wrong. It usually looks fine. The failure mode is everything you cannot see from the front page.
- Anything that takes a customer's money or personal details, where a quiet mistake is a real liability.
- A site that has to be edited by someone who is not you, a year from now, without the original chat history.
- Anything that must meet a standard on paper: accessibility, privacy obligations, an insurer's or a franchisor's requirements.
- Work you are selling on. Handing a client generated code you have not read is their problem later and your reputation now.
- Anything where being found in search matters and nobody has checked how the page is actually rendered and structured.
The guides
6 pages, one subject.
What it is
Where the term came from, what actually happens when you do it, and the vocabulary you will meet on the way.
Read the guideVibe coded websites
The eight things usually missing from an AI-built site, ranked by what they cost you, and how to audit your own.
Read the guideSlop or a website that works
What slop is, the eight tells on a web page, what it costs, and the standard a working website is held to instead.
Read the guideLovable, Bolt and the rest
The platform layer adds lock-in and skips the step that matters. What we use instead, and why it is not close.
Read the guideCursor, Claude Code, Codex
What an AI coding agent actually does, how the three tools differ, and where each sits in a seven-day build.
Read the guideDoing it yourself
The method we would give a friend: decide first, prompt in small steps, and never skip the four checks at the end.
Read the guide
FAQ
Questions about vibe coding
What is vibe coding?
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write the code, accepting most of it without reading it closely. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 to describe leaning fully into the AI's output rather than treating it as a suggestion. The distinction that matters is not whether AI wrote the code, but whether a person who understands it has read, tested and taken responsibility for what shipped.
Can you build a real business website by vibe coding?
You can build something that looks like one in an afternoon, and for a personal project or an internal tool that is often enough. A website a business depends on has to hold up in ways that are invisible on screen: forms that reliably deliver, pages that load fast on a phone, markup a search engine and a screen reader can both read, and code someone can safely change next year. Those are the parts that need a person who knows what to check.
Do you use AI to build your websites?
Yes, on every project, and we would be slower and more expensive if we did not. We use Cursor, Claude Code and Codex daily. What you are paying for is what we point them at: five years of building websites and watching how they performed afterwards, and a strategy session that decides what this business can say that its competitors cannot. The typing was never the valuable part.
Is vibe coding going to replace web developers?
It has already replaced a lot of the typing. It has not replaced deciding what to build, recognising when the output is subtly wrong, or being accountable for a system over years. The developers being replaced are the ones whose only contribution was the typing. The work that remains is judgement, and there is more demand for it now, not less, because far more half-working software exists to be fixed.
What makes a website you build different from one an AI generates?
Two things, and neither is the code. The first is experience: five years of launching websites for other businesses and seeing which pages earned enquiries and where visitors gave up, which is judgement you cannot get from a prompt. The second is strategy: a model returns the average of everything it has read, so AI-built sites tend to feel interchangeable. We spend the first day deciding what this business can say that nobody else can, and the site is built to carry that.
Why do you not build client sites on Lovable, Bolt or v0?
Two reasons. The site would depend on someone else's platform, pricing and roadmap, when it has to outlive our involvement and sit in a repository the client owns. And the path those tools are designed for runs from prompt to live with no step where a person decides whether the result says anything a competitor could not say. That produces the average of everything the model has read, which is the definition of slop, and it is the opposite of what a business website is for. We do not use them for client work and we do not recommend them for it.
Start your brief
Start your brief
Tell us what you're launching and what it needs to do. We reply within one business day with a fixed price and the first available Monday.
- Websites from $15,000 ex GST, fixed. The exact figure comes with the reply.
- A reply within one business day, from Michael, not a form robot.
- A thirty-minute call to hear what the site has to do.
- A fixed-price scope, sent as a web page with a version number.
- Kick-off on the next available Monday, held for you. We take four studio builds a month.