Boss: “Hey, can we swap this color on the website to match the rebrand?”
Employee: “Sure. Easy fix.”
*clicks a few things*
The headline moves. A button disappears, and the footer climbs into the header.
Boss: “…Why is it doing that?”
Employee: *ominous music* “I have no idea.”
—
Nodding to that little scenario?
I get it. I watched three different people live some version of this last week. Different companies, different roles, total strangers to each other. Yet same Tuesday every time.
Each person had built a website using AI. The site looked fantastic, launched flawlessly, and ticked all the right boxes.
Then came the dun-dun-dun moment: someone needed to update it.
And like your kid flicking on the fan while you’re mid-way through organizing your notes, everything scatters at once.
Getting a website online isn’t the hard part anymore. Vibe coding on AI website builders has made it surprisingly simple. The barrier to entry has dropped so much that building a website can feel less like a project and more like just typing what you feel. And to be fair, the results can look impressive.
At least at first glance. But what happens after?
This isn’t an argument for or against AI. It isn’t a debate about whether designers, developers, or marketers are being replaced.
It’s a much simpler question: what happens when your AI-built website has to be maintained?
What’s Vibe Coding and Why It’s Getting Everyone Hot and Heavy
Vibe coding is the new way of building software where you don’t really “develop” anything in the traditional sense. You don’t sit there carefully writing every line of code, planning architecture, or debating whether this belongs in a service layer or a utility file.
You just describe what you want.
Type in a prompt:
“Make it clean.”
“Add a login page.”
“Make it feel premium.”
“Like Airbnb, but for renting goats.”
AI answers: “Yes, master!”
And with a wink, nose shimmy, and nod, poof! AI builds it for you!
A few tweaks here and there, and soon enough, you’ve got a working website that looks like it was made by a team of designers who sleep well at night.
That’s vibe coding: building by intent instead of implementation. You focus on the feeling of the product, and the AI handles the messy reality of turning that feeling into HTML, CSS, components, APIs, and whatever else it decides your idea requires.
Frankly, it works dangerously well, which is why everyone is a bit hot and heavy for it right now.
It’s Manifestation, No Longer Engineering
For the first time, building software no longer feels like engineering. It feels like manifestation. Founders can “ship.” Marketers can “build.” People who used to be blocked by code suddenly aren’t blocked by anything except imagination and a mildly confusing chat interface.
It feels like cheating, in a good way. Until it isn’t.
The Three People Who Called Me This Week
Let me show you what I mean, because the pattern is unmistakable once you’ve seen it enough times.
The Ad Specialist and Her Homepage
The first was an ad specialist who’d built her own homepage and was, rightly, proud of it. Clean, sharp, all of that. Then she went in to tweak one section and discovered she couldn’t touch the markup without something three scrolls down rearranging itself for reasons she couldn’t trace.
She ended up rebuilding the entire thing in a WYSIWYG editor. It wasn’t because she wanted a do-over, but because it was the only way to get back to a site she could steer.
The Prospect With a Folder Full of Concepts
The second was a prospect who showed up with a folder of AI-generated page designs. Some of the ideas were solid, but every page had been built as its own little island.
Different structure, different styling logic, nothing connecting one to the next. Getting them into production wasn’t really development. It was archaeology, except nobody wrote anything down.
The Marketing Team and the Pages Nobody Can Touch
The third is the one I see most. A site gets built properly and handed off to a marketing team. Then somebody on that team starts using AI to spin up additional pages, fast, because why not.
It feels harmless until those pages stop following the original system. The structure’s different, the styles don’t line up, and half a year later, there’s a corner of the website that belongs to no one.
Nobody’s sure how it was made, and nobody’s brave enough to find out what breaks if they edit it.
Three roles, three flavors of the same ending.
No one made a bad decision here. They used a tool to do the exact thing it promised, and it delivered. But “build me a page” and “give me a website I can live with” are two different orders, and AI only ever heard the first one.
Your AI-Built Website Is Great, But Only At One Thing
An AI site builder is excellent at producing something that looks finished. That’s the easy part. The real test comes later, when someone asks, “Can we change this color?” or “Update this section of the layout.”
That’s when vibe coding gets unmasked like a Scooby Doo villain at the end.
Suddenly, nobody is quite sure where anything lives.
Everything is connected to everything. And the one line you want to change feels like it might be holding up three pages, a modal, and possibly the entire universe your business website is built on.
So, yes, the tool does solve a real problem. I want that on the record. It really does. The issue starts when something useful for generating ideas becomes something you’re expected to maintain. Because what makes AI fast at a first draft is not what makes a website stable six months later.
Psst, Claude Never Gave You an “Editable” Website
Everybody swears their site is editable. What they mean is you can open it and type over the words. But so can a ransom note.
Here’s the bar that counts. If changing a headline means filing a ticket or texting a developer, your site isn’t editable. It’s accessible. Those are totally different planets.
And the reason AI site builders flunk this comes down to one thing. AI makes outputs, not systems. An output is a snapshot. Looks done after one press, and whizz bang, works the instant it’s made. But a system is a bunch of parts that know about each other, so when you nudge one, the rest don’t panic.
AI builds for the prompt. Ask it to build for the future, and it can, but you have to know to ask — and almost nobody does.
It’s never going to think about the five people who will touch it after. It is definitely not picturing Susan in finance, three months from now, trying to update one quarterly number on a page she didn’t build and is now slightly afraid of.
Instead, it nails the moment and ignores the rest. There’s no future here. Just now. Spoken like an all-knowing guru.
And in the moment, it works. A single page doesn’t have to agree with anything. It just has to look right by itself. AI is good at that. For now, anyway.
So, Where Does AI Fit in the Website Building Process?
AI gets the early bit — the vague, chaotic, turn-an-idea-into-something-you-can-look-at part. It’s fast. Speedy Gonzales fast. You get something on the screen, and now you have opinions you didn’t know you had.
That part works.
The problem starts when you assume that same thing should continue working once the site is live.
Because once a website is in the wild, the job changes. It stops being “get this into shape” and becomes “survive being touched again” — by different people, at various times, with intentions nobody could’ve predicted at launch.
That’s a different sport. You’re not producing single pages anymore. You’re keeping a living thing alive through changes it never knew were coming.
Structure starts mattering more than speed, because speed already did its job and left.
And vibe coding never signed up for that shift. It’s still in output mode, still building for the prompt, while the website moved on to a problem it was never designed to hold.
Build Your Website For the People Who Have to Live With It
A website doesn’t live in the launch moment. It lives in the Monday morning when someone is already late, multitasking, and now also updating a homepage.
That’s the real environment. So it has to survive that.
This means it can’t fall apart when more than one person touches it. Components shouldn’t mutate into cousins of themselves. A CMS shouldn’t turn a simple update into a small investigation.
New pages should look like they belong there. Not like they wandered in from another project and are hoping nobody notices.
And someone has to have thought about maintenance before maintenance becomes urgent and angry.
Questions like: Who’s updating this? How often will things change? What breaks when someone opens it later and doesn’t remember how any of it works? None of this is exciting. And no one puts it on a homepage or a pitch deck. But, it’s often the difference between a site people use and a site people avoid touching unless they have to.
Wrapping Up
Speed is seductive. Always has been.
But “how fast can we launch?” matters less when anything can be built fast enough to go live in an afternoon.
The more useful question is the one that gets asked a bit too late: who’s responsible for this once it exists, and does what we’ve built make their job easier or harder?
Most AI-built websites don’t fall over because AI built them. They run into trouble because nobody stopped long enough to think about what happens after the launch is over.
Who updates it? Who owns it? And how painful is it going to be to make changes when no one’s excited about it anymore, and it’s just one more thing on someone’s plate?
A website isn’t finished when it goes live. That’s when the real work starts, and that’s the part no prompt can answer for you.
