Why Vibe Coding Won’t Cut It for Business Websites

Imagine conjuring an entire website in just a few hours! All by entering natural language prompts into an AI tool. In the vibe coding world, no complicated coding or developers are needed – all you focus on is the vibe. Popular tools like Lovable and Claude Code have made vibe coding fast and accessible. 

Is it the right solution for your business website? Let’s look at what vibe coding is, how it works, and the drawbacks that affect business sites.

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding means prompting artificial intelligence to generate computer code without reviewing or understanding what it produces. Coined by AI Researcher Andrej Karpathy in January last year, the term ‘vibe coding’ was named the Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year in 2025.

How does it work?

Let’s look at a common use case. James runs a plumbing business in Mawson. He built his own site using an AI tool on a Sunday afternoon, which suited him fine. He’s not precious about design – and something was better than nothing. Anyway, the site looked great on his laptop.

For business owners watching the bottom line, this shortcut looks amazing. No upfront costs – just your time – versus hiring a professional website developer? What’s not to love?

Drawbacks to vibe coding

Now let’s talk trade-offs. A recent report found that ‘humans and AI make the same kinds of mistakes. AI just makes many of them more often and at a larger scale.’

Security vulnerabilities

AI-generated code results in greater security problems, with 2 to 3 times more errors than human-generated code. The most common security risks were related to improper password handling and insecure object references. 

For a business site handling contact forms, customer data, or payments, that’s a serious risk. And the consequences of a data breach can be devastating in lost business, legal fees and regulatory fines, reputational damage to your brand, and more. 

Technical debt and maintenance

Vibe-coded sites are harder to maintain because neither the people creating them nor programmers coming in after fully understand the codebase. The same report found more than 3 times the readability issues in AI code. At first glance, code generated by AI appears fine but often contains mistakes in naming, clarity, and structure that must be fixed later, creating technical debt. 

Changes, updates, and bug fixes become progressively harder and more expensive. People who use vibe coding to set up their websites then have to hire programmers who call themselves ‘vibe code fixers’ to correct all the mistakes.

No understanding of your business

AI generates code based on patterns in training data. It doesn’t know your business goals, your audience, or your compliance requirements. 

Business goals

It’s difficult to scale a vibe-coded website as your business grows. Vibe coding prioritises the front-end look over back-end functionality, making it hard and expensive to expand these websites later.

Audience

Vibe coding can’t tailor the navigation menu to suit your users’ journey if it doesn’t get who your users are. The user experience (UX) may ‘feel’ right, but lack a functional path.

AI may not prioritise functionality in navigation. It may ignore website conventions. If search bars or back buttons aren’t where users expect to find them, then they get lost and frustrated with the website.

UX is particularly critical in the checkout process. If the process is too complicated, rather than clear and functional, 18% of customers abandon their carts. Vibe coding can build something that looks good and technically works but still misses the point entirely. 

Compliance requirements 

AI may ignore your requirement to comply with Australian Privacy Principles for customer data. For example, AI may generate a form that looks great but defaults to ‘collect all.’ An AI-generated form might ask for a Date of Birth or TFN (Tax File Number) because of its training data, even if it’s not ‘reasonably necessary’ for the business function.

AI may also disregard accessibility requirements in favour of a particular ‘look.’

Brand credibility

Your website is often the first impression a potential customer gets. Vibe coding pulls from the most common denominators of style already out there. It’s easy to recognise an AI-generated site – there’s nothing unique about them. 

If your website looks generic and inconsistent, it communicates something about your brand, whether you want it to or not. 

Performance

Vibe coding doesn’t prioritise code efficiency, so load speed suffers because of bloated scripts. Also, if the code for the same element differs between pages, then users see a visual flicker or jitter as the element reloads. That also slows the loading speed. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 

Vibe coding generates SEO errors, which affect how Google ranks your website. Common problems include header tags used incorrectly, metadata not matching actual copy, and missing or broken internal links. 

Google ranks websites for page speed, SEO, structured data, and accessibility. Vibe coding doesn’t prioritise any of them.  

What happened with James?

While James’ vibe coding website looked fine on a laptop, on the phone, it was a different story. The contact form sat half off-screen, the click-to-call button didn’t work, and the page took 9 seconds to load. He didn’t know any of this because he’d only ever checked it on his home laptop.

For 14 months, anyone who found James on Google and tried to contact him from their phone hit a wall. James assumed business was just slow. It was only when a mate pointed out the mobile issues that he realised what had been happening. By then, his Google ranking had dropped significantly. A slow, broken mobile experience is one of the clearest signals Google uses to push a site down the results.

He lost out on a lot of potential revenue and needed a professional to rebuild the site. In James’ case, vibe coding cost more than it saved.

Where vibe coding has its place

It can be useful for projects designed to be built in a weekend with no intention of long-term support or for visual mockups. However, that’s about the only use case we can think of.

Choose the alternative: a professional build

What’s the alternative? Let’s look at an example of a professional build. 

Sarah runs a naturopathy clinic in Braddon. For years she had a templated website that wasn’t doing much for her. She had a custom WordPress site built in late 2023 by an agency: discovery session, copywriting, custom WordPress build, the lot. It took 6 weeks and cost around $6,000.

Within 4 months, her website was ranking for ‘naturopath Canberra’ and a couple of condition-specific search terms her old site had never touched. She gets roughly 8 to 10 enquiries a month through her website, which she didn’t before. When a new practitioner joined her clinic earlier this year, she easily added a new staff page to the site because the website back end had been built with care. The developers ensured the site was easy for Sarah to update herself in the future.

Futuretheory’s take

We’re not anti-AI – we use AI tools in our own work. But there’s a big difference between AI-assisted development, where a skilled developer uses AI to move faster while maintaining oversight and accountability, and vibe coding, where the output is accepted with no real understanding.

That distinction matters for a business website. Real revenue and reputations are on the line. Any vibe coding advantages in cost and speed evaporate as soon as something goes wrong, and no one actually understands the codebase. 

Business websites need strategic intent, technology, and ongoing accountability and support. We build sites we can stand behind, maintain, and improve over time. That’s what professional web design and development buys you. 

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