Vibe Coding Is Less Vibey Than It Looks

You’ve seen the posts. Someone waaay younger than you, announcing a deal bigger than any you’ve closed, or a funding round, or a brand-new business, all built on a vibe-coded website.

One sentence in, one gorgeous website out.

So you think, hey, the brand site needs a refresh anyway. How hard can it be? You type, “Build me a website with member login and a shopping cart,” and head to lunch feeling like a tech founder.

When you get back, there’s no website. There’s a quiz.

“Quick questions before I start: React or Vue? Static or server-rendered? SQL or NoSQL? Which auth provider? Where should we host?”

You know what a website is. You have no idea what half of those words mean, or whether you’re supposed to have opinions about them.

“You pick!” you type, bravely.

And it does, instantly and with total confidence. A real website appears, built from nothing but plain English. You feel like a genius.

For about an hour. Then the login button stops working. The AI fixes it. Then the cart breaks. Soon you’re pasting error messages you can’t read into a chat window, asking a developer you can’t evaluate to repair choices you didn’t know you made. Your tokens drain like a bathtub with the plug pulled.

“You’ve run out of tokens. Top up to continue.”

That’s when it hits you. AI did make things easier. You can get a website out of plain English now. But it is still not 'that' easy.