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What is a vibe coded website?

Where the term came from, how these sites get made, why so many of them look the same, and when a visitor should care.

By the Kitsuvo team · · 4 min read

A vibe coded website is a site built mostly by prompting an AI tool, where the person behind it describes what they want and accepts what comes out, without writing or closely reading the code. You type "a landing page for my dog-walking business with a booking form", the builder produces it, you ask for changes in plain English, and you press publish.

The phrase has moved from developer slang into everyday use, usually with a raised eyebrow. This explainer covers what it means, how these sites are made, how to recognise one, and when it actually matters to you as a visitor.

Where "vibe coding" comes from

Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who helped found OpenAI and later led AI at Tesla, described "vibe coding" in a post in February 2025: you "fully give in to the vibes", talk to the AI, accept its changes without reading the diffs, and paste error messages back in until things work. He presented it as a way to build throwaway weekend projects.

The name stuck, and it stretched. "Vibe coded" now describes almost anything made mainly by an AI app builder or coding agent, from a weekend prototype to a business's main website.

How a vibe coded website gets made

The typical path takes minutes:

  1. Prompt. Someone describes the site to an AI app builder such as Lovable, Bolt, v0, Base44, Replit, Manus or Figma Make.
  2. Generate. The builder writes a full web app, almost always React styled with Tailwind CSS, using the shadcn/ui component library. Many add a database and sign-in through a service like Supabase.
  3. Iterate. The person asks for changes in chat. The builder edits the code.
  4. Publish. One click puts it live on the builder's own subdomain, such as my-shop.lovable.app. Some people then connect a custom domain.

Every step leaves something behind: the hosting, the runtime scripts, the template defaults and the copy. Those traces are how vibe coded sites can be recognised. Our guide on how to tell if a website was made with AI walks through them one by one.

Why vibe coded sites all look the same

If you have noticed a wave of sites with the same rounded cards, purple gradient and "Get started" button, you are not imagining it. A few causes stack up:

  • Shared defaults. Most builders generate from the same handful of templates and the same component library, so they start in the same place.
  • Shared taste. Language models learned web design from the same public examples and drift toward the most common answer: an indigo or violet gradient, a centred hero, three feature cards.
  • Shared copy. The first draft of the text comes from a language model, which leans on the same phrases. See the phrases that give away AI-written website copy.
  • No edit pass. The point of vibe coding is speed, so the defaults often ship as they are.

We go deeper in why AI-generated websites all look the same.

Is a vibe coded website bad?

No, not by itself. A florist who builds a clean, honest site in an afternoon is better served than one with no site at all. "Built with AI" describes where a site came from, the way "built on WordPress" does. It does not tell you whether the site is good, honest or safe.

There are, however, a few patterns worth knowing about:

  • Careless data handling. When nobody reads the code, nobody checks who can read the database. Security researchers have repeatedly found vibe coded apps exposing user records because access rules were left open. Be careful what you type into a sign-up form on a site that looks freshly generated. See are vibe coded apps safe to sign up for?
  • Abandonment. A site made in an hour can be forgotten in a week. Orders, bookings or messages sent through it may go nowhere.
  • Mass-produced pages. Builders make it cheap to publish hundreds of thin pages aimed at search traffic. Kitsuvo calls these slop and labels them separately.
  • Impersonation. The same speed that helps a florist helps a scammer clone a bank's sign-in page. This is the one case that should stop you. Read how to spot phishing sites built with AI builders.

How Kitsuvo labels vibe coded sites

Kitsuvo, our no-AI web browser for Mac and Windows, keeps those questions apart. Every page gets a score from 0 to 100 for signs it was built with AI, read as one of three labels:

  • 0 to 39, No strong AI signs. Nothing conclusive found. This is not a claim that a person built it.
  • 40 to 69, Possibly vibe coded. Some signs, but no builder fingerprint.
  • 70 to 100, Likely AI-built. Strong evidence, usually with the builder's name.

That score is a neutral note. Only a separate impersonation check, a look-alike site asking for a password or card, ever interrupts you. Everything runs on your own computer. Read more on the Kitsuvo home page, or see the fingerprints behind a Likely AI-built label in how to tell if a website was built with an AI builder.

Questions people ask

What does vibe coded mean?

It means built mostly by prompting an AI tool rather than writing code by hand, usually without the person reading the code the AI wrote. A vibe coded website is a site made that way, typically with an AI app builder like Lovable, Bolt or v0.

Who coined the term vibe coding?

Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher and OpenAI co-founder, in a post in February 2025. He described giving in to the vibes and letting the AI write the code.

Is vibe coding the same as using an AI coding assistant?

Not quite. A developer who uses an assistant like Copilot and reviews every change is still writing software in the usual way. Vibe coding is when the AI does the building and the person mostly steers by describing the result.