We need to talk about vibecoding, because for
2025, this was the word of the year.
And I have to tell you, I'm not here for it.
Hey, I'm Holly Christie. I am the host of this
podcast, Websites Made Simple. I'm a website designer.
I am a website designer and developer's mentor as well.
And I am here to help you to have a career that
you actually absolutely love without being run into the ground.
So let's get started.
I was at a conference the other day and I was sitting next
to someone and it wasn't a web designers conference because they don't really exist,
do they? We can change that one day. So I was at this conference and
the person next to me was talking to the person next to her and
she said, oh, well, this is no problem, I can vibe code it.
Now, this person is no way any form of website designer
or developer or anything like that. And the person next to her said,
what's vibe coding? It's just AI code. You can throw into
Gemini or Claude and it'll build you a website.
And after I'd been a little bit sick in my mouth because this just
so shouldn't be a thing, the person next to her didn't look impressed
either. But I thought this conference full of other business people is
not placed to address this. But lucky for you, this
podcast is, as I've said, vibe coding, where we get AI
to code the website. And there are a lot of
vibe coded websites out there this year because there are
a lot of people who are thinking, we don't want to
pay for a website, we don't value the website design. I
don't think that people actually think I don't value using a website
designer. But it can be a little bit like the
difference between when you use a decorator to decorate your
house or you choose to paint it yourself, you never going to do as
good job as the decorator does. And vibe coding
is just like that. And I don't know
whether you've come across many Vibe coded
websites or even parts of websites. I
will have clients come to me in a little bit of a panic and say,
I had wanted something to work
in a blog post or on a page I'm doing. So I took it to
AI to get the code for it and I put that code in there and
it's not working. There are so
many kind of good examples where you can take this to ChatGPT and you
can say, could you code this thing for me? And chat says, yeah, of Course
I can. Here you go, here's the code. And you put it in and it
doesn't work. And you say to chat, yeah, that code didn't work. And then
chat's like, yes, of course it didn't work, it's missing this. And so you say,
okay, can you code it again? And let's do it again and you can go
back forth, back forth, back forth. And all you're going to end up doing is
just wasting everybody's time. There are times when
we. I suppose I wouldn't really think of it as vibe coding, but there are
times where we will use AI within websites. And you'll see lots of
the website builders now do have AI built into them
or AI options. And these can be great tools
for making something very, very quick. So I'm old school, I
will still look if something's gone wrong with the website, I will be sit there
looking at the code, I will be looking for the anomalies, I'll be
turning off plugins, I'll be testing this, I'll be testing that. And
sometimes it's much easier to say to chat or Claude or
Gemini or whatever you're using. Can you debug this for me?
This is a great way of speeding up stuff when it
comes to websites. We're not using it for the build, we're not
asking it to generate reams and reams and reams of code. We're just saying, can
you look at what's already there and tell me what's not working?
Sometimes it's going to be able to do it, sometimes it's not. And I think
when it comes to using AI in web design, it's about
using it for the times where it's going to be really effective
and not using it
necessarily for the front line of stuff, because that's
really where the role of the designer or
the developer comes in. Because even though these
AI models are built on so much research
and so much understanding and they're coming from
tools like, you know, Gemini is owned by Google, and Google are the ones who
tells us really what they want the user journeys of websites to look like
and all that sort of thing, Vibe coding just doesn't
take into account user journeys. So it might say, like, make this look
really cool or make this happen or whatever else, but it doesn't
do that role of guiding the user through the website
in the way that I'm gonna say still needs a human touch.
Again, it's like if you get one of the chatgpts
or you know, whatever it is to write the website copy, it's
gonna be well structured. Although if you've been working
with AI generated copy, you'll generally see that it
is not structured into SEO
friendly structure, which I just always find crazy. It just says
like, here's the heading for this and here's the heading for that. But it's not
actually saying, use this as a heading one, use this as a heading two, put
your call to action in there. It still takes that experience.
And this is why I
really want to reassure you that I don't think that you should be
worried about vibe coding. Whether it's the word of
the year or not. I just don't think you need to worry about it because
the people who value their website
and the journey that it's going to take their users on and the
experience they're going to have, which is going to take them all the way through
to buying the products, the service engaging with you
is the stuff that's still really going to come through from human design,
human written content. And you know, don't get me wrong, I do get AI
to help me with writing my content. Naturally, if you are
signed up to my newsletters, then you will probably have
experienced some of that because I will kind of format the story
of what I want to say in the newsletter and I'll take it to ChatGPT,
who knows me quite well these days and say, you know, can we make this
really palatable? And I want it to have this vibe and it's really
good at doing that.
I like to keep AI on the more kind of periphery
parts of my business. I feel like the websites are the products that
I am handing over to people and I want
those to be robust. I want them to be fully
tested. I also like using page builders for websites
because I want the website to be something that the client
can use once I've handed it over. I've talked before about
having really good website practices and it is not
good practice to not give your clients an admin login, to
not give them the site without them being able to handle it.
And page builders, yeah, which have been around forever now, like people
can be real purists about them and say, oh well, I only Recommend Using
a WordPress framework with ACF or something like that,
which is fine. But I do think in this day and age, especially
when business can be quite hard won anyway,
it's quite important that owners of their websites can use their
sites and if the site has been vibe coded, then they can't do
that. The other thing that I've seen quite a lot of this
year, and I even had happen this morning, is
web designers who get in touch with me for mentoring and say
they've just published a website, or they're just about to publish the website
and the client has a crisis of confidence.
If you have had this or you're going through this,
feel free to get in touch with me because I know how much it can
knock your confidence to have someone say, I'm not sure that this is the best
it can be, or we've now published the site. I've
had other people look at it and this is their feedback. It's really
hard because people can absolutely tear people apart and
tear the websites apart, whether they mean to
do it or whether they're doing it to try and get new business or whatever
else, it can just chip away at your confidence. If you
have done the website and built it by human
design, let's call it that, you've done it yourself, then
we can look at that website together and say, right, how can we strengthen
this to help the client feel really secure within it? When you're
vibe coding it, you can't do that because you're just taking AI's idea
of what a website should look like and you're just chucking that
into the databases. Just, it's not going to be
a thing. The main thing I would say is don't feel
threatened. Keep being absolutely brilliant
at what you do best, which hopefully, if you're listening to this podcast, is
websites. I'm not saying that vibe coding is going
to pass, but I do think that people who are using
vibe coding to build websites may end up coming in
for, you know, I have my website clinic appointments where
we work on website design together. Or they might look at doing
a more extensive website course and
they would definitely want to look at doing an SEO course there as
well. So don't feel threatened, just keep being
brilliant at what you're doing. If you have a vibe coding story,
I would absolutely love to hear it and to
get in touch and let me know. You can find me at
helloebsitesmadesimple.co.uk, you can find
me on LinkedIn as Hollysim. See Christie and
on the website, the hello at Websites
Made Simple. If you'd rather leave a voice note, I love a good voice note,
visit the podcast page. You will see that there is a form there.
Right, until next time, happy designing and see
you again.