Collins Dictionary named "vibe coding" its word of the year for 2025.
You have probably seen the phrase.
You may have nodded and moved on.
What vibe coding is
Collins defines it as "the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code."
In everyday terms: you describe what you want in normal words. AI writes the code. You test it, say what is wrong, and it fixes it. Repeat until it works.
The term came from AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025. His version was looser. He described fully giving in to the vibes and forgetting the code even exists.
I definitely wouldn't recommend running a business that way. Contrary to what Gen Z's may think, nobody ever survived on vibes alone.
Three ways to get a website
1. A template builder. Squarespace, Wix and similar. You pick a layout and fill in the blanks. It is quick and safe. You are limited to what the template allows. My current site runs on Squarespace, and for many businesses that is the right call.
2. A traditional custom build. A developer writes the code by hand. You get complete control. You also pay for every page, form and feature to be typed out by a person, in time and in money.
3. Vibe coding. Custom code, like option two, but written by AI from your descriptions and directed by a person. You get the flexibility of custom work without every line being typed by hand. In my experience that makes it much faster than a traditional build.
That is the whole difference. The code is real either way. What changes is who types it.
What it makes possible
Templates give you what the template has. Custom code gives you what your business needs.
I built my own time tracker with AI help. It captures what I'm working on every fifteen minutes in one tap, then turns the week into a finished timesheet summary every Friday. A template builder was never going to do that.
For a small business, this opens up the useful, boring things. A quote form that does the maths. An intake page that sends the right information to the right person. A tool for one repetitive job that eats your week.
What does not change
All that certainly sounds enticing. What people fail to mention is that AI does not know your business. It doesn't understand your clientele, your friction points, your bottlenecks... These are nuances that only the business owner would know.
Without that insider knowledge, AI can only give you a superficial solution to the most generic concept it has of your business.
If you cannot clearly say what the site or tool is for, who uses it and what a good result looks like, AI will happily build the wrong thing quickly. Resulting in hours of tweaking and rework, driving up what you initially saw as a cheap solution to a mundane problem, into a painful back-and-forth match of revising the AI output.
That is why the work starts with a solid understanding of what are the pain points you are trying to fix, and how to write clear and concise prompts to get what you want.
The part nobody likes to say
Fast does not mean accurate.
Veracode tested code from over 100 AI models and found AI-generated code introduced risky security flaws in 45% of its tests. Larger, newer models did not fix that.
So the version where nobody reads the code is a poor fit for a business that holds customer information. Someone has to review, test and document what was built. That is the part I do not skip. Everything I build gets tested, documented and handed over so you can run it without me.
So which one do you need?
If a template does the job, use a template. I will tell you that honestly.
If you need something a template cannot do, or you are tired of working around its limits, custom code is worth a conversation. Vibe coding makes it faster and more affordable than it used to be. A person still has to be accountable for the result.
Not sure which fits? Tell me what you are trying to do through the contact form, and I'll tell you which one fits.