That DreamHost email you saw is part of a massive marketing push happening across the tech industry right now. They recently ran campaigns with titles like “I Taught My Grandma To Vibe Code” because the concept is incredibly hyped and highly marketable.
Here is the candid reality of what is happening in the web development space, and what it means for your workflow.
What Exactly is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is a trendy term—coined in early 2025 by former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy—for building software using natural language. Instead of writing syntax line-by-line, you describe the “vibe,” layout, and logic to an AI agent (like Cursor, v0, or Claude), and it generates the code for you. You act more as a director, reviewing and refining the output, rather than a traditional typist.
When Will It Go Mainstream?
It actually already is mainstream right now in 2026. Tools that allow you to generate functional web apps from a simple text prompt have completely saturated the market. It is currently estimated that over 40% of all new code is AI-generated, and “vibe coding” even made the shortlist for Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year.
Is Your Time Going to Pass?
To be completely straightforward: no, but your role is absolutely shifting. The industry is changing rapidly, but your foundational skills are actually becoming a premium asset. Here is why:
The Blueprint Still Matters: AI is fantastic at generating rapid prototypes and boilerplate code, but it struggles heavily with the “last 20%” of a project. When managing a portfolio of around 20 websites, knowing how to properly and efficiently structure basic elements like menus, headers, content blocks, and footers is crucial. AI will often generate messy, insecure, or unoptimized code that requires a human architect to untangle.
The Eye for Polish: AI doesn’t inherently understand what makes a site look professional or cohesive. Your experience curating clean designs and relying on modern, high-performance architectures—like a Rust-based Tailwind CSS v4 engine—gives you a massive edge over someone who is just blindly copy-pasting AI outputs without understanding the underlying framework.
The Evolution of the Developer: You are transitioning from a typist to an editor. Moving away from older, clunky platforms and embracing streamlined, visual, hand-crafted tools already shows you know how to adapt and optimize your time.
A Hiring Advantage: If you are actively looking to land remote computer roles, combining your deep understanding of structured, hand-crafted site design with these new AI tools is a massive resume booster. It shows you have the architectural knowledge to ensure quality, and the modern tooling to build incredibly fast.
Vibe coding isn’t going to replace developers who know how to build fast, high-ranking, structurally sound websites. It is just going to replace the developers who refuse to adapt to the new tools.
Would you like me to suggest a few specific ways you can integrate vibe coding AI into your current workflow to rapidly speed up your daily builds?
I’d be more interested to hear your thoughts @MichaelDroste instead of Gemini’s.
Do you use AI to build anything in Elements at the moment? If so, what are the types of things you are building? Images, Text, Custom Components, a mix of all of those, something else entirely?
If you are building things with AI, how are you finding the experience?
I have (or Claude has ) written an Apple App that interfaces to a home automation system. The App runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Apple Watch and Apple TV. It is CarPlay capable but I haven’t submitted that to Apple yet.
The thing is, while I am reasonably au fait with Python, PHP, javascript etc, I haven’t written a line of Swift / Swift UI for this App - it has been pure Vibe coding using Claude (Max). It helps of course that my background is in IT development.
I originally used ChatGPT and Mistral to develop an Elements DevPack to automatically schedule players for Pickleball games. All controlled via the website. I just pointed Claude at the PHP code and told it to generate an iOS App with linking between the website and iOS App. It asked a few questions and then went ahead and did it. Again, I hadn’t developed an iOS App before.
I have got Claude to review and improve my own internal custom Devpack components: Blog, Calendar, Carousel etc. It implemented multiple improvements.
Of course it sometimes goes off-piste but that’s to be expected.
So, yes in summary I would definitely say that vibe coding is a thing and has the potential to save shed loads of time.
In essence, the notion behind Vibe Coding is that you turn programmers into product marketing managers. You’ll see that the more successful ones doing any kind of AI “coding” are writing MRDs (Marketing Requirement Document) in Markdown, building STYLE.MD documents, and more. These are submitted along with the write a program request.
Not all programmers make great product marketing managers (and vice versa). Then when you throw design into the equation, you add another skill set that needs to be resolved.
I know a number of programmers who’ve been using AI engines for some time now. Most of them have rebuilt their approach to programming akin to what happens when you promote a really good programmer to being a manager of programmers. The AI is like a bunch of interns and adequate programmers that you’re managing.
I’ve used my own AI (I have LLMs running on my Mac Studio and maxed out MacBook Pro) to create a game, much like my programmer friends are creating programs with Claude. It’s a building process. But like my programmer friends, one of the things I really appreciate from the LLM is its ability to build and run tests against what is built. So when my game was “finished” in design, I was then able to run it through a huge amount of Monte Carlo type simulations to start to understand how it played.
However, I’ll continue to point out to everyone that you have to always remember that these AI engines are (1) only as good as what they’re trained on; and (2) always backwards looking. They’re really exceptional with making something that already exists, when used properly. They’re pretty poor at creating something entirely new, mostly because they’re trained on patterns, and patterns have to already exist to train them.
To answer @differentdan’s question: custom HTML Components. Though as more and more new things get done by others, I’m finding that I have to do that less. Example: I originally used AI to build a Breadcrumbs Component. Now, however, I see that there are such Components in a number of third-party offerings, and one of them was better than the one I quickly conjured up, so I’m using that instead.
Things changed in the last quarter of 2025, particularly when Claude was updated in December. Last year having an AI “program” wasn’t all that great. However, Claude (and now ChatGPT’s latest) were revised and retrained. Claude is now quite good at programming. However, if you’re building an app you want to do more than say “build me an app.” The more you can direct the AI with specifics, the better it will do. You need to be specific about UI needs and how the user will interact, what sort of functions should be coded and what each does, as well as any dependencies or sequencing that are implicit. A good “vibe” takes maybe four or five .MD files (with directives and specifics outlined) and three or more “chats” to get it fully invoked.
I’ve found that it also helps to have the AI ask the questions. So for instance, when I started my game, I told the AI about what I thought the game was, who it was for, how it would work, and then asked the AI to begin asking me specific questions that I’d answer that would help me bring it to life. After about the 15th question-and-answer session, I realized that it should have enough to get started and then and only then did I tell it to “build” the game. Even then I had more work to do to refine it. But I had a really good foundation from the back and forth.
I currently use AI to write schema, image alt tags, content, browser title, page title, slug, canonical url, aria label, meta description, internal website links, styled text, headings, notes for my developer, and the copy (hashtags and link to client’s website) for a social media post.
All at once, all with a simple copy/paste.
The use of AI has opened up a door that once took so much time, hard to have quality control from developer to developer, and gone are the days, ‘sorry I forgot to add the….’
Now, instead of building a website and adding pages for SEO over time, I’m thinking in reverse and identifying which pages need to be built and building them all at the launch of a website. I’m not quite at this part yet, but will be very shortly. My 3.0 of AI will get me there.
) written an Apple App that interfaces to a home automation system. The App runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Apple Watch and Apple TV. It is CarPlay capable but I haven’t submitted that to Apple yet.