Vibe coding is what people now call describing software in plain language and letting an AI write it. You do not read the code carefully. You look at the result, say what is wrong, and go again. It works remarkably well for a website — and it stops working the moment you need that website to exist at a real address, because publishing is the one step no chat window does for you.
Where the term came from
The phrase has a precise origin. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and formerly director of AI at Tesla, posted it on X on 2 February 2025:
“There’s a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”
He later called that post a throwaway thought. It spread anyway. Merriam-Webster picked it up as a Slang & Trending entry in March 2025, and it now has a full dictionary entry defining it as using an AI system to generate computer code in a given programming language. Collins named vibe coding its Word of the Year on 6 November 2025.
The speed matters more than the trivia. A working practice went from one person’s tweet to a dictionary headword in under a year, which tells you how many people started doing it.
What it actually looks like in practice
You open Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Lovable or Replit. You describe a page: a portfolio for a photographer, a landing page for a workshop, a menu for a restaurant. The tool writes the HTML and CSS. You look at it, ask for the header to be darker and the type larger, and it rewrites it.
Nothing about that requires you to read a line of code, and that is the honest appeal. Designers who have avoided front-end work for a decade are now shipping pages that look exactly like the ones they drew.
What you end up holding is a folder. Usually an index.html file, sometimes a stylesheet and an images folder beside it. Occasionally a ZIP. That folder is a complete website. Opening it shows your site, and the address bar says file:/// — which means it exists only on your machine and nobody else can see it.
The gap between finished and online
This is where vibe coding stops being frictionless. The tools that write the site are conversational and forgiving. The tools that publish it were built for software engineers and are neither.
Ask an assistant where to host what it just built and you will be pointed at Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages. All four are excellent. All four also assume a repository, a build command, a CLI, or at minimum a mental model of deployment that the person who just vibe coded a page has deliberately never acquired.
Almost every first upload that breaks does so for one of two reasons. Either index.html was not at the top level of the uploaded folder, or a file was renamed with different capitalisation than the link pointing at it. Neither is a coding problem, and neither is explained anywhere in the chat you just had.
So the last ten percent of the job — the part that turns a file on a laptop into something you can send to a client — costs more effort than the ninety percent that came before it. That is the actual problem worth solving.
What to look for in a host for a vibe-coded site
The criteria are different from the ones a developer would use. Speed of build pipelines and framework support are irrelevant here. Four things matter:
It accepts a folder. Not a repository, not a Git connection, not a command. If the first screen asks you to import from GitHub, it is not built for this.
Updating is the same action as publishing. You will change the copy. If the second upload is harder than the first, you will stop updating the site. Worth checking: Vercel Drop creates a new project on every upload rather than updating the existing one.
A custom domain and SSL are included, not a paid extra. A site at a real address is the point. Several free tiers give you the hosting and charge for the domain connection.
Commercial use is allowed. Check this before you put a client on it. Vercel’s free plan is explicitly non-commercial, and a client landing page does not qualify.
Publishing what you built, start to finish
Get the files out of the chat. Ask the tool to give you the complete site as downloadable files. In Claude, export the artifact. In ChatGPT, save the file it produced. Ask for everything in one folder rather than in separate messages.
Check the folder opens. Double-click index.html. If your browser shows the site, the folder is complete. If images are missing here, they will be missing online too.
Upload the whole folder. Not just the HTML file. The stylesheet and images have to travel with it. On sofast, dragging the folder in takes about fifteen seconds to a live address.
Add your domain. If you already own one, point it at the host. If you do not, the included subdomain works for sharing while you decide.
Open it on your phone. Ten seconds, and it catches the layout problems an AI tool routinely leaves behind.
Common questions
The answers below cover the quality of vibe-coded sites, ownership, cost, SEO, and what to do when the AI tool cannot fix its own output.
For a static site — a portfolio, a landing page, a brochure site, an event page — usually yes. The HTML and CSS produced by current models is competent and standards-compliant. The weak points are consistency across pages, accessibility details, and responsive behaviour on unusual screen sizes. All three are worth checking by hand before a client sees it.
For the HTML and CSS of a static site, in practice yes — you can download it, edit it, host it anywhere and no tool holds it hostage. Check the terms of the specific tool if the site is commercial. The more important lock-in question is the host, not the code: pick one that lets you download your files back.
The two real costs are a domain name, typically $10 to $20 a year, and hosting. Static hosting is cheap because there is no server doing work: free tiers exist with real limits attached, and paid static hosting generally starts around $5 a month. Anything charging you $30 a month for a five-page static site is selling you capacity you will never use.
Yes. Search engines do not care who wrote the HTML. What they care about is that the page loads quickly, works on a phone, has a real title and description, and says something useful. A well-built static site is a good starting point on all four counts — static pages are typically faster than the database-driven alternative.
Start a fresh conversation and paste in only the broken file rather than continuing a long thread — long contexts make models loop on the same wrong fix. Describe what you see rather than what you think is wrong. If it still fails, that specific piece is the one worth handing to a developer; it is usually twenty minutes of their time.
It has replaced a category of work: the simple brochure site that used to cost a few thousand dollars is now something a designer produces in an afternoon. What it has not replaced is everything with state, data, authentication or integrations behind it. The honest framing is that the floor moved, not that the profession vanished.
Pick the guide for the tool you actually used — each one covers the export step, which is where most people get stuck.
