AI in Web Design: Vibe Coding
At Yellow Cherry, we’ve been noticing an increasing trend in people using AI bots to generate websites.
Known as “Vibe Coding”, this is where people enter their prompt into an AI bot and ask it to generate a website for them with varying degrees of success.
Although the benefit of this is the extremely low cost entry to the end user and not needing to have the ability to read/write code in order to build a website, there is a number of significant drawbacks.
- Maintenance – Any app, no matter how perfect it is, will require maintenance from time to time. This could be simple things like updating a platform language, but it may require much more complex changes. An AI-generated site will be difficult to maintain if the author of the site has no knowledge of how the site works.
- Security – AI generated anything is pulled from a massive data well of previously written code/text. It does not have the ability to independently come up with its own solutions, it can only repeat what it has previously seen. Since all code would have been written in the past, it will likely contain a number of security vulnerabilities that would need to be fixed or resolved.
- AI Credit – Most AI Models charge for their usage, and this can run up very quickly. If you are building a site with an AI and need to make revisions, the AI will likely need to rebuild the whole site in order to make those revisions instead of just editing the small specific section. This could cause an AI usage bill to skyrocket very quickly.
- Support – If you are looking for support with your AI site from tech-skilled folk (like us at Yellow Cherry!), then you may be out of luck. As AI generated sites are generally a patchwork of different technologies lumped together, it may prove very difficult to diagnose any issues and provide support. We work from a framework to create our sites, and we are highly skilled in every aspect of them so we can provide a wealth of knowledge and experience in the work that we provide.
- Legality – AI models tend to ignore Copyright licenses when they look for material to use. If an AI model uses a copyrighted image on your site, then it will be your fault if a copyright claim is made against you. There is also a number of laws that govern how websites are built in the UK, which an AI model won’t take into account when it is generating a site. You may end up in legal hot water if you publish a website that does not meet these laws.
In the market for a human-coded website? You’ve come to the right place – get in touch!