Please don't vibe code your personal website

I have experimented enough with AI coding agents that I have come to pick up on their design style, and I've been noticing it on the internet more and more. Some of its stylistic choices I can articulate: too much animation, pointless elements, too many colors, sloppy overuse of haptics, buttons that are too padded, and interfaces that are simultaneously too complex and too simple. But there is also just a feel to these websites. When I see a personal website that is vibe coded, I can immediately tell, and I am immediately disappointed.

Making a website is easy. HTML pages hand-made by university professors in the 1990s still look fine, maybe even better than some so-called "modern" websites. The main change that needs to be made for the 2020s is a few CSS tweaks to make things more mobile-friendly. But these old websites are simple, easy to maintain and update, and generally have a clear, non-annoying UX. The motherfucking website series teaches you basically everything you need to get started online, and you could certainly do worse than following its recommendations.

It's not even that AI is the problem: it's probably easier than ever to open up a text editor and start asking an AI agent "how do I do X in HTML" and start working. My issue is with completely handing over to an AI agent matters of style and taste: it has none. I have come to find AI-generated content of many kinds so aesthetically offensive that bad or naive designs that are at least human-created are actually quite charming in comparison. I miss when the worst thing you could say about a sign is that it used Comic Sans. I'd prefer Comic Sans 100 times out of 100 to the uncanny, blobby fonts that ChatGPT comes up with. Comic Sans was designed: even if you don't agree with its decisions, it has a coherent and consistent aesthetic vision.

AI will do the same that it does to images or fonts to your personal website: it will blunt away your personal idiosyncrasies and taste in favor of something flat, generic, and more than anything, incoherent: something that gives the vague impression that it was "designed" by soullessly mushing together tens of thousands of popular HTML templates. I don't want your website to look like that. I want you to think about how you want your website to look, and even if your design decisions are naive or even sloppy, I would much prefer a naive human design to the "best" that an AI can come up with. Your website is meant to be an expression of you: your tastes, your interests, and so on, and is one of the last things you should be exporting to a machine.