Vibe-coded home

I used to have a personal website in the past, when I was still freelancing, but as I did not have any use for it, I stopped maintaining it and then cancelled it altogether few years ago.

As I started to explore AI beyond the chat window recently, I wanted some real use case to work on. So I set aside one day to build my personal website from scratch.

Not prototype. Not plan. Build, deploy, publish.

I used no template marketplace. I wrote almost no code manually. I described what I wanted, iterated on what I got, and made decisions along the way.

Vibe coding

A rapid compression of the gap between idea and artifact.

The friction that used to sit between “I want X” and “X exists” - learning syntax, debugging environments, managing dependencies - largely disappears. What remains is a different kind of friction.

Decision friction.

Every few minutes, the AI produces something. And you have to answer: is this what I meant? Is this what I want? Is this good enough? That is harder than it sounds. Especially when you are building something personal.

The real bottleneck

The hard part is not technical.

The hard part is clarity.

What do I actually want to say on a homepage? What should a visitor understand in the first few seconds? What does “simple” mean when applied to something that represents you professionally?

The AI can generate ten variations of a hero section in minutes. Choosing between them requires having answers to those questions first. Vibe coding does not remove the requirement for clarity. It removes the excuse for delaying it. Before, a non-developer could defer those decisions. The technical barrier created a buffer. You could say: I’ll figure out the messaging once the build is further along. That buffer is gone. When the “how” becomes instant, the “why” becomes urgent. The decisions need to keep up.

How it went

The site went from concept to deployed in one day, few hours actually.

It is not a complex site. Clean layout, clear sections, nothing unnecessary. The process was iterative and non-linear. I would describe a section, review the output, push back on what felt wrong, refine, move on. Some parts came together quickly. The homepage headline went through six versions. That felt like the real work. Not the code — the headline.

AI removes the technical obstacles. What do I actually want to say? becomes the main question.

Vibe coding produces something fast. It does not produce something distinctive. Distinctiveness requires a point of view. The AI defaults to sensible, coherent, generic — unless you push against it with a clear perspective on what you want to say and why.

The tool is good. The bottleneck is you.