So I'm making my new website with AI, AKA vibe coding. Let me start by saying: I am not and will not ever use AI to replace my writing, because it is a therapeutic medium for me and is largely why I'm making the website to begin with. In my purposes, I'm using AI to write the code; the skeleton and functionality of my website. Seeing that it's not my career but that I have tangential experience, I'm interested in seeing how AI can help me accomplish my goals in web development. The website is in a state I'd say is "nearly done" and I've been working on it for about three days now during my winter break from school.


I know that many people don't want anything to do with AI, but I think it's important to embrace it on some level and monitor its technological progress as time passes. As technology has evolved in the past, it will continue to do so whether we like it or not. And as a society, I think we're past the point of 'containing' AI.


Anyway, I'm actually writing this post in the middle of development so I can take a break. The website isn't even live yet; I'm writing this using a PHP server running on my laptop to view the website and write this post. The website is getting close, but there are some AI quirks which make the process drag on. In my own coding experience, the most complicated thing I ever made was a sudoku puzzle generator, and it made five different difficulties of puzzles, which sounds perhaps a little easier than it felt making. I spent the greater part of a semester in my self-guided C++ class programming it and I was pretty dang proud of it. Fun fact: you need 17 clues at a minimum to guarantee a unique solvable sudoku puzzle (I learned that from this Numberphile YouTube video) and putting those 17 clues in any spot does not guarantee that it's unique; only specific arrangements of those clues will work.


Back on topic, AI has made it incredibly easy to get back into coding, and it's made it easier (and cheaper) than ever to make my own website. Of course, I'm writing purely from a consumer standpoint here; it's competitive in web development with tools like Squarespace, for instance. This isn't about being selfish and shutting out web developers, this is about good old fashioned market competition and technological advancement. When website builders like Squarespace came along, they were the ones who shut out the real web developers; AI is simply presenting that same threat to Squarespace.


My website is being developed in Google's Antigravity IDE using PHP, CSS, and Javascript, and maybe some others that I don't know about. Honestly, I haven't paid much attention to it. I'm interacting with Google Gemini 3 Pro using natural language prompts (full sentences, as if I were talking to a person), telling it what I want to be done and what I want my website to look like. Beyond that, I don't really know a whole lot about what's going on, other than some bits here and there that I can read based off prior coding experience.


Here's what the development environment looks like:

On the left you've got all the code, and on the right you have the AI chatbot where you give it the vibes and it gives you a website.


From a novice programmer standpoint, here's what I like and don't like about AI doing all the heavy lifting:

Likes

  1. Don't have to know anything about coding
  2. AI gets probably 90% of the initial work done VERY fast, under a minute
  3. If I don't understand what some code is doing, I can figure it out by just asking the AI
  4. I don't have to know exactly how to tell it what I want, I can just imply, and it will infer what to do
  5. It's competitively cheaper than other website building tools (i.e. Squarespace)
  6. I'm able to set aside technical know-how and look at the website from a designer's point of view, focusing on style and user experience
  7. VERY usable on a poor internet connection. We've had power out all day and I've spent the entire day developing my website using AI and an iPhone hotspot with 1/5 bars of 5G connection. I tested the download speed which ranges anywhere from 0.5 to 2.5 megabits per second; the internet in general is practically unusable at this speed, but seemingly not with AI, which is a simple text interaction. To be honest, I haven't even noticed a difference in usability compared to when I had internet up.


Dislikes

  1. I have no idea what I'm actually doing...
  2. My code could be very inefficient and I'd have no clue
  3. The website could be the target of a hack and I would have literally no idea (please don't, I don't have anything to steal)
  4. For some reason the AI just deleted like half my code but my website still seems to work just fine. I'll chalk it up to magic and crossed fingers.
  5. Why do I have five blog post deletion methods? What the heck. Excuse my language, Gemini.

I've noticed some "development loops" that happen as a result of developing with AI. The main one I've noticed is: when I want to modify existing features, Gemini will almost consistently introduce new bugs into old parts of the code. So in order to expand the website and its functionality, I must add new features, test the entire website, have it fix bugs until everything is right again, and continue to expand from there. It will also do things like round the corners on a rectangular button for seemingly no reason at all, when I didn't ask it to do that or anything even remotely close to it. It doesn't do it frequently enough that it becomes very problematic, but it does it enough that it is definitely annoying.


That being said, I think Google Antigravity with Gemini 3 Pro is probably the first time that I've actually sat down with AI and felt like I was truly doing something productive. I had tried developing a website during the summer with ChatGPT prompts, but I ran into hurdles that were too annoying to overcome. To be honest, I really don't think Google Antigravity is a replacement for proper web development. The only thing I have confidence in is what I've tested, and I simply cannot test everything. Website builders on the market have already figured out most of this stuff for end-users like myself. The difference is, I don't have to pay up the butt for one template that is the closest to what I want and I don't even like and that I might not even end up using. Instead, I can take inspiration from any website I see, or any concept that I think of, and tell the AI to make it a reality.


It's much more versatile, and I say that having used many website builders before. It's not uncommon for it to simply make the thing that I request and, generally speaking, I can be as specific or as vague as I wish. For example, I asked it in one or two sentences to make a two-factor authentication system for my admin account, and it just... did it. And it was working, in the theme of my website, on the page that I wanted it, and in the format that I asked for. Yes, I tested it to make sure it did it right, and it did. Of course there were aesthetic adjustments to make, but it was basically just... done. Just like that.


This post is getting long so I'm gonna wrap it up here. I don't know quite yet what to make of AI development and vibe coding. My thinking is for small, personal use cases it can probably help a lot of people with a lot of things, but the scary part is the misinformation and AI hallucinations that you don't have the knowledge to check for. This alone is what makes me hesitate to put my website on a live server for the world to see. But here I am, doing it anyway.