I was at a networking event recently, and the same sentence came up three separate times, from three different people: “I just vibecoded my website with Claude.” I’ve heard the same about people’s CRMs too. And said with pride — fair enough, honestly. A few years ago that sentence wouldn’t have made sense to anyone. Now it’s within reach.
Underneath it is a belief worth taking seriously: that a website is a thing you can just have now. Describe it, get it, move on to the next thing on your list.
If you haven’t come across the term, “vibecoding” is building something — an app, a website, a CRM — by describing what you want to an AI tool in plain English rather than writing the code yourself. No design software, no code editor, no developer. Just a chat.
AI tools are genuinely good at this
Let’s not pretend otherwise. For something live and functional — a page that explains what you do, how to contact you, a bit of personality — AI can get you there fast, and it’ll look considerably better than the DIY sites of ten years ago. For an early-stage business or a side hustle, that might be exactly the right call. I’m not writing this to talk anyone out of it.
But here’s the bit that’s easy to miss
AI gives you the tools. It doesn’t give you the judgement.
It answers the question you asked. What it can’t do is tell you which question you should have asked, because it doesn’t know your business, your customers, or what’s actually stopping people getting in touch. It’s remarkably good at making something look finished — and often you’re too close to your own project to spot what’s missing either. When it’s your business, you already know what you mean, so it’s easy to assume a visitor will too. That’s not a criticism of the tools, just the shape of the problem: you don’t know what you don’t know, and no amount of polish fixes that.
It’s increasingly visible, too — not just to a trained eye. AI-built work has a look and feel of its own: certain layouts, phrasing, design choices, the same way you can often spot a stock photo at a glance. True of websites, just as true of AI-written content and graphics. “Looks a bit AI” is becoming a thing people notice, and it undercuts exactly the trust a site’s meant to build.
Two risks worth naming directly
Data protection.
If you’ve vibecoded a CRM now holding customer names, emails, and contact history, you need to know where that data actually lives, who can see it, and whether the tool is set up to be GDPR-compliant for that use. Same question for a website with a contact form or booking system bolted on. “It works” and “it’s compliant” are two different checks — easy to skip when it’s just you, moving fast. I’m not a solicitor, so I won’t pretend to give legal advice, but if your build touches customer data, get someone who knows UK GDPR to look at it.
Hallucination.
AI can state things with total confidence that simply aren’t true — in code as much as copy. Claude, ChatGPT, whichever tool you’re using — they all say it with the same utmost confidence whether they’re right or not. A broken function that looks plausible. A form that appears to submit but silently doesn’t save anywhere. If you don’t know what “right” looks like, you’ve no way of spotting when it’s got it wrong. Confidence in the output tells you nothing about whether it’s correct.
What that looks like six months in
No one’s watching the unglamorous stuff — updates, security patches, whether the contact form still sends anywhere. The homepage still shows the launch offer, because updating it means going back into a tool that already feels finished, not ongoing. SEO groundwork that never got done properly caps how much the site’s ever found. No analytics or goal tracking, so there’s no way to notice it’s underperforming — just a vague sense the site “isn’t doing enough.”
A few other things tend to surface: legal pages that are missing or generic boilerplate that doesn’t match what the business actually does with data. Broken links with no redirect strategy. Integrations — payment, email marketing, booking — that stop working with nobody watching, and no backup or rollback, so the site has no safety net.
Maybe the hardest one: change gets harder over time, not easier. The AI doesn’t carry forward the reasoning behind how it was built, so every edit means re-prompting from scratch and hoping nothing else breaks.
This reminds me of when I first started out and built my own theme — proud of it at the time, but I’d forgotten all the intricacy behind it within a year, and version one of the Happy by Design theme became a headache to work with as the business evolved. In version two, I moved to a well-known theme with a proper community of developers keeping it maintained, rather than that knowledge living only in my head.
None of that stops the site looking done. From a glance, it can look fantastic — look closer, and something about it doesn’t quite add up. That’s what makes it hard to notice yourself: a vibecoded site can look completely finished on day one. But the gap shows up a few months later as “why isn’t this bringing in any enquiries,” with nothing obvious to point to.
So what are you paying a web designer for?
Not “a website exists” — that part’s genuinely commoditised. You’re paying for someone who’s built enough of these to spot where the gaps are, and who builds with the goal in mind: not just “does my business exist online” but “does this website do the job it needs it to?” That’s the whole idea behind the conversion-led approach I take with clients — design is just the beginning. The real work is figuring out whether the site’s converting the right people, and fixing it if it isn’t. Sometimes your first edition of a website can be improved 10 fold.
There’s a wider version of this worth sitting with. As AI-built websites, content, and graphics become the norm, the thing that stands out is the opposite — visibly, unmistakably human. A founder who actually understands your business. A design choice that couldn’t have come from a prompt. Copy that sounds like a person, not a pattern. The more common AI-built work becomes, the more that human layer is worth — not as nostalgia, but because it’s genuinely rarer, and people notice.
Where that leaves you
Building your own site — with AI or without — is a legitimate choice. Just know which trade-off you’re making, and keep an eye out for the “why isn’t this working” moment, because it tends to arrive quietly. That’s usually the point to get a second pair of eyes on it — not to redo the whole thing, just to find the gaps you couldn’t see from the inside. That’s more or less what my new CRO Snapshot is for, launching this September — finding the gaps that could make all the difference to your customers. If you decide it’s time to bring someone in, here’s what actually matters when picking who.
If you’d like to talk through what your site actually needs, get in touch.