A newsletter came my way today that sparked an interest - vibe coding. I am curious as to what everyone is raving about and what all programmers are screaming in terror of. Might s well see what I am up against.

I recently tagged along with a friend to take a look at the inner workings of the Dutch flower wholesaler. I used her business as an inspiration for this project. I know how much time it will take me to create something like this and wanted to know how long it would take if I vibe coded it.

My prompt: (okay that scrolled off but it goes something like this) I need a website for my garden design business, I decorate gardens updated for each season in a year. I would like to pull my instagram posts into a blog segment. I can be contacted via x, y, z. I would like all the config for colors, custom text and images to be separate from the code. Plus a small shop of less than 100 items to sell my overstocked items from my projects. Make it fully seo taggable.

I agreed to add a database and all enhancements.

10 minutes in:

I had it (reissued instructions) to pull the styling out into config.

It is taking, what feels like 20 minutes to complete this, forever to get anything done now.

I had it make it fully responsive,and change out banner image and title. It is pretty much dying on me now, too much text to tokenize. I still have a few broken images and lost my title. Phone numbers look funky - all the signs that this is some sort of scam. Plus, any further requests take between 30-60 minutes.

If I try to edit the code, it says to work with the Replit Agent (i.e. AI), which means that I am not allowed to edit it. I also have to deploy in Replit.

It is pretty good/ I have been away from the frontend stuff for a while, it saved me a day and some to generate it this way. Is it spaghetti code? Absolutely. Debugging (AI doing it) is shit? Absolutely, it feels like it is straining.

I am able to download the code but not deploy it as I requested a db integration (which ist forgot about and is now redoing).

Summary: It saves a lot of time. As a hands-on developer, I hate to be tied to any single stack or technology or platform, it is one of my biggest strengths and I see from this exercise, Replit takes that away, it strats to take a lot of time for it to iterate through the files and the changes do not work for.. example, a shopping cart.

It also takes away a lot of joy from figuring a problem out. I mostly sit here and twiddle my thumbs while it toils away making new mistakes. I don’t know how this is replacing programmers but either it is doing throw-away code (for a sale of a house - static site, use once and tossed) or some startup (no heavy traffic, not many enhancements) or the developers it is replacing are not very good to begin with and they do not understand what production level code looks like. Arguably, it is more work than working within Wix (if you know how to do it fast) and slapping together templatized sites. I would not use it for a business site, but I would use it for a throw-away site. The searches for usable images and art is awesome but the links to 20-30% of the images are broken.

Mostly waiting (replacing long build times, ha!) and this is the results deployed. Welp, removed the database components, stripped it down and got the downloaded zip to compile and deploy but it failed in Netlify. It is utter garbage as a whole but I have no doubt that it will do UI and code snipplets well.

Netlify Deploy Badge

Problem: We have a vite front end with a node.js server that also gets bundled in /dist. So we are now picking up Netlify serverless functions. And I feel suss about that since serverless means cost. Again, I am feeling a bit emasculated by the whole process of simplification. It’s a slippery slope.

I guess the easy way is to deploy to Replit or write this a different way (by yourself). Replacing developers? No. Using it to write the basis of an algorithm, definitely. It cannot piece together a big picture. A lot of work to fix startups that limped on vibe coding - sure! I can already hear this conversation: business: “we just need this one small thing fixed, everything else worked perfectly.” me: “I have to rewrite it. I will spend more of your money paying me per hour than me just rewriting it.” business: “but we spent so much time prompting it into perfection”. me: “if you insist on paying by the hour.”

9/10 for web design with the UI. It mostly works. 1/10 for common sense. It is a bit of a mess.

You will just have to settle for a screenshot!