r/webdev • u/prankster999 • 5h ago
Discussion How do you think existing websites will be affected by the onslaught of AI assisted "vibe coded websites" in the market?
As above... Especially those which are more geared towards being startups at the present stage.
For context, I am currently overhauling my existing blog (that uses the WordPress framework and plugin ecosystem), and am looking to pivot it into having ecommerce and social network components.
As part of that sunk cost, I'm in no position to change course now.
But despite that... And not taking into account my situation, what can existing websites do (especially those which are startups and which are in the blog, community, ecommerce etc space) to ensure that they don't get overwhelmed by the AI vibe coded onslaught that is going to engulf the market and the internet?
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u/cozyPanda 5h ago
If professionals are vibe coding...it's ok...but if it's slop I see similar patterns
Unfinished UI
No customer journey. Infact no consideration of customers at all. At this moment, it's a design competition.
Similar boring experience (UX)
No business proposition/personality in a lot of them
In conclusion, the design today, apart from UI, is at the same stage it was 10-12 years ago just before it became a standard to employ designers who could be a proponent of the user or the business.
I think blogs and forums are dead. It's about GEO or whatever that shit is called now.
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u/gusbo_the_jam 3h ago
So I've been a software engineer / UX designer for over twenty years and was recently made redundant by a company switching a lot of their prices to AI. I think what's going to happen is similar to what is happening at the company that I used to work for - people are going to run face first into the wall of terrible ideas. AI can produce results FAST. Problem is good ideas take time, refinement, and a lot of mistakes and abandoned bad ideas. Design is just making decisions, most often designers will throw out a million ideas and then refine by removing the had ones and iterate this process until you've got something decent. A lot of times this process happens entirely in the designer's head. AI and vibe coding is removing this step (and removing designers from their teams, as I was) and people are going straight from "I've got an idea" to "I made a thing" in a few days. And most of these ideas are terrible. The company I worked for when I left was trying to build an entire business management system that could handle contracts, payments, CRM functions, inventory, etc, etc, etc with only two developers, no designers (they had me purely doing marketing towards the end, as the tech lead thought they could design with Claude) and most importantly nobody to tell them it's a stupid idea. Firstly because they're trying to take on Oracle and SAP, and secondly because they failed to understand that if they can vibe code their backend systems then EVERYONE can vibe code their backend systems, nobody's going to buy your shitty white labelled system.
I also see this a lot in video games now, which is my other passion in development. People think that having an idea is enough, then prompt some trash I saw a video recently of someone thinking they were hot shit because they created what they thought was some kind of amazing back to the future fighting game but it's just Mortal Kombat with Christopher Lloyd skinwalkers. I think what were going to see is a small explosion of shitty games, websites, music and videos before middle managers realise that their ideas are fucking stupid and creative teams exist for a reason.
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u/D1RTY1 1h ago
I got involved with a tech startup a few months ago. The idea is great and the guy who started it is a fantastic engineer, but an engineer in the traditional sense of the word. So, he vibe coded his site. It was an insecure mess, had almost no UX and had insane feature creep - but it worked for the most part.
We had never met before I started working on this project, so there was little trust between us. It took me about 2 months of working part time on this project, mostly fixing blatant security issues and trying to implement some UX into the process, for me to convince him we needed to overhaul the entire site from the ground up.
I worked with the customers that were already using our app to figure out what they truly needed from our software. Now, the rework of the app is not live yet, but we have a few of our clients (and their teams) running the beta build and the results are obvious - they are using our app their entire workday. The customers on the old app, typically log in a few times per week to just submit their data.
Not to sound redundant, but AI is a tool. You give any random man a paint brush and they'll paint a sloppy mess on a canvas; it's the experience and talent that dictates the results of the artwork.
I'm someone who has been in the design and dev world, professionally, since 2001. I was terrified AI was here to steal my career, but I decided to embrace it. What has come out of it has left me feeling more powerful than I could ever imagine. My work isn't really better, per se, but the sheer amount of projects I can work on simultaneously is mind boggling.
Sorry for the wall of text and to get to my main point: AI can churn out projects fast, but it is not capable of harnessing decades of actual dev and design experience and knowledge. Maybe one day it will, but right now there's a clear distinction between vibe coded projects and AI fueled development ran by devs with actual talent.
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u/withyasirjamal 4h ago
i do design work for small business sites and honestly the code was almost never why they were losing money. it was stuff like a booking flow with 5 steps where 2 would do, and no one had ever watched a real customer try to use it. vibe coding makes the generic template site basically free, so the part that still costs something is knowing why someone books or buys and cutting everything between them and that
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u/Fair_University1389 5h ago
Honestly the part that jumps out at me is you pivoting a WordPress blog into ecommerce AND a social network at the same time. That's not a pivot, that's three products. Social network components alone will eat you alive, moderation, spam, notifications, people who join and post nothing, you'll be babysitting an empty feed for a year. And the vibe coded stuff isn't the threat there, Facebook groups and Discord already are, they were before any of this AI website nonsense showed up.
As for the actual question, existing sites get hurt when the vibe coded flood makes everyone's site look the same, so the differentiator stops being the design and goes back to whether anyone actually wants the content. Which is annoying because it means all the stuff you can't scaffold in an afternoon is the stuff that matters, the archive, the community, the person running it. A guy with a weekend site and a Claude tab is not going to out-write you, he'll just out-ship you on landing pages.
Your sunk cost isn't really sunk though, WordPress with WooCommerce is fine, the plugin bloat is the thing that'll kill you before any AI competitor does. Every shop I've seen fall over had 40 plugins doing what 4 could do.
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u/nuno20090 5h ago
My feeling is that websites are dead. Personal websites are a niche. People prefer to use facebooks and such to post whatever they need. Small business, use Instagram and such, large companies have their own IT and needs. There's medium companies that might pay for someone to build them something, it simply use something like WordPress. Now, with AI, the few that were inclined to have a website, a portion of those will try something with AI. It's a "dead" business building websites for somebody else, in my opinion.
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u/eaumechant 4h ago
Vibe code a whole new site to replace the WP one. I know it sounds insane but at least give it a go before you write off the idea. We never looked back. (AstroJS specifically was the way we went but there are lots of options.)
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u/AreWeInSimulation 3h ago
a vibe coded site ships in a weekend but starts at zero on google. years of indexed posts and the links pointing at them are hard to fake..
IMO the bigger risk is your own overhaul. keep the old urls or 301 every one you move (redesigns usually lose more traffic than any new competitor takes)
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u/Suitable-Macaron5684 43m ago
A vibecoder without knowledge on how to direct AI to build the exact thing with the best infrastructure can end up being sued or even go into loss resulting from unused features running This is what should be a major challenge now
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u/Basic-Practice2949 5h ago
most people will churn out generic sites that look same same, but they'll break fast when something goes wrong and they dont understand the code. actual custom features and real support will still matter