The Truth About Vibe Coding for Business Owners

Today I want to talk about vibe coding, and I want to talk about it in the sense that a solopreneur or small business owner would use it or not use it. There's been a lot of chatter out there about vibe coding and how you can do this simple thing and you just talk into this program and it will create it for you. And yes, it will. There's several of them out there. I've used Base44. There's several— there's another one called Lovable, and there's just several different programs, and there's probably more coming out every single day. And there's a ton of people talking about it in the tech world about how easy it is to do this and that and how we don't really need developers or coders anymore. And I wanna say I'm really frustrated with the chatter of what's going on around vibe coding. And it's great if you are in the tech industry, if you're a website designer, if you are a coder of any sort, um, even if you're somebody who easily picks up how to make Zapier connect to your CRM. Those types of, of people. Great tool. But for your average consultant, author, coach, small business owner, service provider, the people that aren't living at their computers all day long, it's really not that big of a thing. As a matter of fact, It's a huge rabbit hole that will suck away your day and you'll be like, what happened? My day's gone. I got nothing done. And it's because it's not for you. Yes, you can use it. And I'm sure there's a ton of people that are going to say, Dotty, you're just blowing smoke. Anybody can use it. It's so easy to just go out there and and tell it to do what you want it to do, and it'll just create it for you. As a web designer, I've heard this a lot about websites. It's like, why on earth would you hire a website designer when you can go to one of these programs and it will build you a website? Yes, it will. You heard me say that it will build you a website. But what are you gonna do with it? Like, you can go to Claude and Claude Code and build a website. You can go to Gemini, you can go to ChatGPT, and you can tell it what you want and it will build you a website. And it lives in that platform. Like, what are you gonna do with it? Now you have to have the knowledge to be able to take that code and put it somewhere where it's useful. Put it on a hosting account, uh, adapt it to WordPress, make it go into Wix, make it go into GoHighLevel, you know, make it go into some web platform so that it's accessible to the internet. Do you know how to do that? Probably not. And yes, you can ask Chat. You can say, hey Chat, now what do I do with this? And it will tell you something that may or may not be accurate. I've had it tell me lots of things that weren't accurate and didn't work, and when I pushed back, they're like, "Oh yeah, that was a different version." Um, so it's a huge waste of time if you're a service provider and the service you're providing has nothing to do with technology. So I just wanted to put that out there because there's been— I've been getting phone calls from service providers, my customers, saying, you know, hey, can I do this? It's like, well, yeah, you can do that, but what are you going to do with it? Like, I'm in the middle of making a tool that I would never have been able to make without these programs. That I will then make available to my customers. But if you're just a one-time user and you want to make a tool for yourself, for your own business, that's great. Then you can go to that tool that you created and you can use it. But if you want to make it available for everyone to use, That's a completely different story of how you're going to create it. Here's another really important thing that— and this is back to websites. So let's say you went to Claude or Gemini or, um, ChatGPT and you create a website. And let's say you figured out how to take that raw code and make it available to the internet. I mean, like We're going backwards in time. When I first started building websites was before the what-you-see-what-you-get editors were really even working well, and I hardcoded every website. And I learned how to put them up on a hosting account and save the files on my computer, upload them. I learned all of that, and I can do that again with the code that ChatGPT gives me. Um, but that's going backwards by like 20 years. So why— I'm kind of lost as to why that's a big thing. And then the other thing about that is that it'll work if, you know, say you figured out how to upload it to a hosting account, you've got the website live, you've got your domain connected. Now what? Since you didn't use a what-you-see-what-you-get editor to create it, you now get to make changes by adjusting the code instead of being able to log into someplace and easily make changes. You've taken that away. Let's say you don't care. You've created that code, you know how to go back and fix it. No big deal. Uh, now let's look at optimizing that. Did you understand how to write that code in a way that would now be findable on the internet? Probably not. So then you take it to a web designer and you're like, can you optimize this? And most of them are going to look at you like you're crazy. Because the answer is going to be no. They didn't start by hard coding. I mean, you could bring it to me and I could do it, but I don't want to. I would not do it even though I know how to do that. So that's another issue. Here's another issue, and it's called security and your website getting hacked. Okay, now you've probably purchased a shared hosting account from GoDaddy or Network Solutions or HostGator or Bluehost, and you've got your website up there and it's shared with people all over the world, literally. And you have no security built into that code because what you see, what you get editors build security in, and there's plugins that you can add that will enhance that security. And now you've just got hard code again. So there's literally no security. Like, you can go back to your program and you could say, you know, ChatGPT, would you look through this code and make sure that there are no bugs or insecure things that is going to cause me problems? I guarantee you it will find several and it will fix them for you. But then you put it up and now wait, I don't know, a week, a month, a year, whatever, and there's new issues, I guarantee you that website is going to get hacked. And who knows what will happen with it? And you're not gonna have the ability to just easily fix it. You're gonna be paying somebody a lot of money to bring it back, whereas you would have been better off in the very beginning to just pay somebody that knows what they're doing instead of vibe coding, because that's all the rage. It's what everybody needs. It's what everybody's talking about, how easy it is to do all these things. I just want to tell you, it's a huge rabbit hole that keeps getting deeper and deeper. And deeper. And it's a fantastic tool for somebody who is a coder, who understands all of the code that it creates, and who can go in and fix things, and who knows the questions to ask to get it fixed for them. It's a fantastic tool for those people. For people that normally mow your lawn or put your roof on or do your plumbing, or they're an author, or they're a business coach of some sort, it is a huge rabbit hole that you will never find the bottom to. I'm sure there's a ton of people who disagree. I would love to hear your opinions on this in the comments. Um, again, from the position of I'm a business owner who does not live in technology. So I, I definitely honor how these tools are fabulous for us people that live in technology. But I would love to hear arguments, yes, no, uh, back and forth, whatever. I will certainly answer your questions in the comments if you have any. And yeah, let's see, what is your opinion on going down the rabbit hole of vibe coding?