Ideas
When everyone ships a website
Vibe coding lets anyone build a website, but it cannot make that website unique and safe
People who have never written code have taken to vibe coding, and they proudly announce the app or the website they designed and put online. I mean it: welcome. Building is no longer the scarce skill, and that is good news for everyone, starting with those who had an idea but not the means to make it real.
Two things stand out when I visit them. They all look the same, and above all they look like the tool that generated them, Claude or ChatGPT: the same hero, the same palette, the same three cards, the same phrasing, and no attempt at a signature of their own. When nobody makes the choices, the tool makes them, and it makes the same ones for everyone. And most of them ship bugs and security holes nobody has reviewed: a secret key left in the bundle, a form that trusts whatever it receives, a dependency nobody picked. The tool did exactly what it was asked; nobody checked what it handed back.
Artificial intelligence and human stupidity: an explosive mix
It happens away from code too. Holidaymakers asked AI where to go and all ended up in the same spot, down to colleagues from the same office who had planned nothing together (see The Conversation). A website generated with no verification and no validation is a holiday picked by AI: you think the choice was yours.
The craft was never about typing. AI does things right; doing the right things is still up to us: deciding what to build and what to turn down, then checking the result before putting it in front of strangers. Vibe coding removed none of that. It made the first step free and left the other two exactly where they were, with slightly fewer people to take them on.
The website is the easy part: the craft begins once it is live