Vibe coding – the practice of building functional software by prompting an AI tool with natural language rather than writing code manually – has captured a lot of attention in 2024 and 2025. Tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Cursor have made it genuinely possible for non-developers to generate working websites in hours. The demos are impressive. The speed is real. And for certain use cases and certain kinds of businesses, it is a legitimate option.
For (non-web) designers, I think it is almost always the wrong one.
I want to be clear about what this is and what it is not. This is not an argument against AI in the design business context – I use AI tools regularly and think they are genuinely useful in the right places. In fact, we’re currently vibe coding our Signature Experience Design Tool – and it’s a lot of fun! But, I’m also an engineer with 20+ years of experience AND, I specialize in building websites and other digital (and non-digital) experiences for professionals and brands in a lot of different industries.
Also, this is not an argument against designers learning new tools or experimenting with technology. It is a specific argument about why vibe coding a website for your design business is likely to cost you more than it saves, in ways that are not always immediately visible.
What Vibe Coding Actually Produces
To understand the limitation, it helps to understand what vibe coding tools are optimised for. They are optimised for speed and functional output. You describe what you want, the AI generates code, and you end up with something that works – a site that loads, has navigation, displays content, and can accept a contact form submission.
What they are not optimised for is strategic alignment. A vibe-coded site will reflect the prompt you gave it, not the brand architecture underneath your business. It will look like whatever aesthetic is implicit in the AI’s training data and your description – which, in practice, tends to produce something that looks like a competent generic website. Not wrong, exactly. But not distinctly yours.
The gap between a site that functions and a site that converts, positions, and builds authority is significant. Functional is the floor. For most design businesses, the website is one of the highest-leverage brand touchpoints they have – often one of the first intentional impressions a prospective client forms. A site that looks assembled rather than designed does not just miss an opportunity – for a design professional, it actively undermines the claim being made.
The Specific Problem for Design Businesses
Most businesses can absorb a generic website without significant damage to their positioning. If you run a logistics company or a software tool, your website serves primarily to provide information and a contact path. The aesthetic is secondary to the function.
Design businesses are different. The website is not just a communication channel. It is evidence. A prospective client looking at an interior designer’s site, a product brand’s site, or an architect’s site is not only reading the content – they are evaluating the taste, the judgment, the attention to detail, and the level of intentionality behind every visual decision. They are asking, often without fully articulating it: if this is how they present themselves, how will they present my project?
This is why your website is not just a marketing asset – it is a demonstration of your professional standard. A vibe-coded site, however clean or functional, carries the fingerprints of its production method. The spacing will be close but not quite right. The hierarchy will be logical but not refined. The typographic decisions will be reasonable but not considered. These are small things individually. Cumulatively, they communicate something about the business that a design professional cannot afford to communicate.
Speed Is Not the Problem AI Is Solving for You
One of the most common reasons designers are drawn to vibe coding is time. Building a website properly takes time (unless you work with us), and time is the resource most founder-led design businesses are shortest on. The appeal of generating something functional in an afternoon is real.
But the time saving is largely illusory, for two reasons:
- The first is that a vibe-coded site is not finished when the AI generates it. Getting it from generated output to something that actually represents a design business well requires iteration, refinement, and often significant manual correction – which requires either coding knowledge you may not have, or more prompting cycles that compound in unpredictable ways. The AI does not know what your brand sounds like, what your clients expect, or what your positioning requires. You have to supply all of that through the prompt, and it is very difficult to prompt your way to a genuinely refined visual outcome.
- The second reason is that the time you save upfront tends to be paid back later – in a site that is harder to update without breaking things, that lacks a clear content architecture for adding new work or pages, and that eventually needs to be replaced anyway because it does not grow with the business. The short-term efficiency creates long-term technical and brand debt.
What a Website Actually Needs to Do
A website for a design business should not be a brochure. It should be a conversion and authority system. Every structural decision – the homepage hierarchy, the portfolio presentation, the service page architecture, the inquiry flow – should be made in service of a specific kind of client making a specific kind of decision. That requires strategic intent before a single page is built.
All this requires understanding what your brand needs to communicate and to whom, and then making every design and content decision in alignment with that.
Vibe coding tools begin from the output end – what does this look like – rather than from the strategic end – what does this need to do, for whom, and why. For a generic business, that order of operations is tolerable. For a design business, it tends to produce a site that looks reasonable but does not work, in the sense that it does not reliably move the right people from awareness to inquiry.
The sites that consistently convert high-value clients are not the ones with the most impressive visual effects or the most current aesthetic – they are the ones built with clarity: clear positioning, clear evidence of authority, clear path to taking action. That clarity is the result of strategic thinking applied before and during the build, not generated from a prompt. A thorough website brand alignment audit done before any build – vibe coded or otherwise – will do more for your conversion rate than any tool.
The Authority Problem
Now there is a deeper issue that is worth naming directly. Design businesses build authority through the consistent demonstration of taste, judgment, and intentionality. Every client interaction, every piece of content, every visual touchpoint either contributes to that authority or slightly erodes it. A website produced by a vibe coding tool – however good the tool – is not a demonstration of your judgment. It is a demonstration of the tool’s output given your prompt.
This matters because the clients worth attracting – the ones with significant budgets, clear briefs, and a genuine appreciation for what premium design delivers – are often more perceptive about these signals than you might expect. They may not be able to articulate why a website feels slightly off… But they feel it. And that feeling shapes whether they send the inquiry or move on. Brand authority is built through accumulated signals of genuine craft and intentionality.
Where AI Does Belong in Your Website Process
None of this means I think AI has no role in building or maintaining a design business website. It has a useful one – in the right places.
AI is genuinely useful for generating and refining copy – drafting page content, iterating on headlines, stress-testing whether messaging is clear and specific. It is useful for SEO research and structure – understanding what your prospective clients are actually searching for and how to organise content to address it. It is useful as a thinking partner during the strategic phase, helping you clarify positioning and pressure-test your value proposition before a single page is built. And it is useful for content maintenance once a site is live – drafting new portfolio entries, blog posts, or service page updates in a consistent voice.
Having a clear brand guide in place before you use AI for any of this makes all of it more effective and more on-brand.
What AI is not useful for is replacing the strategic and craft decisions that make a design business website work. The structure, the visual hierarchy, the typographic refinement, the conversion architecture, the brand alignment – these require human judgment applied with intention. That is not a limitation of current AI tools that will be solved in the next release. It is a fundamental mismatch between what these tools optimise for and what a design business website needs to do.
My Honest Recommendation
If you are a designer considering vibe coding your website because time or budget is genuinely constrained, I understand the logic. And I will not pretend that a thoughtfully built website does not require real investment – of time, money, or both. Those constraints are real.
But if the choice is between a vibe-coded site that undermines your positioning and no new site yet, I would argue for patience. A placeholder page with a strong headline, clear positioning, and a working inquiry path will serve a design business better than a complete site that communicates the wrong things. You can add depth and pages over time. You cannot easily undo the first impression a weak site creates with the clients who matter.
Vibe coding is a genuine innovation, and it will find its place in many workflows. But a design business website is one of the highest-stakes brand assets you will build. It deserves the same level of intention and craft that you apply to your client work. Using a tool that bypasses that craft, however efficiently, is not a shortcut. It is a trade-off with consequences that tend to show up later – in the quality of inquiries, in the clients who do not reach out, and in the gap between the business you are building and the one your website is presenting.
Lastly, ask yourself: Is your time better used learning vibe coding or getting new clients and serving them? If the answer is the first, here’s another question: Would you recommend your clients to vibe design their own homes… or work with a pro like you?
