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You ever hear a new tech term and immediately feel… tired?

Like you’re supposed to be impressed, but something doesn’t quite add up?

Yeah. That’s how I felt the first time I heard “vibe coding”.

Welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple with me, Holly Christie!

In this episode, I’m talking about what vibe coding actually is, why it’s suddenly everywhere, and why I’m really not here for the idea that AI-generated websites are a shortcut to doing things properly.

I share what I’ve been seeing behind the scenes — clients in a panic because AI-written code doesn’t work, websites that look fine on the surface but fall apart when you try to use them, and designers whose confidence gets knocked after someone else tears their work apart.

This isn’t an anti-AI rant. I use AI in my business. But I keep it on the periphery — not at the heart of the products I hand over to clients. Because websites need to be robust, usable, and something people can actually manage once they’re live.

We’ll talk about where AI does make sense, why user journeys still need human thinking, and why vibe coding doesn’t replace experience, judgement, or good website practice.

If you’re a web designer wondering whether you should feel threatened — or a business owner tempted to let AI “just build the site” — this episode is here to steady the nerves.

Come and find out more at websitesmadesimple.co.uk or email me at [email protected]

Skip to the good bits:

00:00 What “vibe coding” actually means

01:34 Why AI-built websites keep breaking

04:51 Where AI helps — and where it doesn’t

07:56 Page builders, usability, and admin access

09:19 Client confidence and human-led design

10:00 Why you don’t need to feel threatened

Mentioned in this episode:

Remember to sign up for our blogging masterclass!

Go to https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/masterclass

Blogging masterclass

Join my Sparks Group Mentoring Programme

Free Resources

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.