The short answer
Usually, yes, but not to redo your work, to finish it. "Vibe coding", building something by describing it to an AI tool rather than writing the code yourself, was Collins Dictionary's word of the year for 2025. We're seeing it land on our desk every month now: a business owner arrives with a working site they built with a tool like Lovable, Bolt or Replit, and asks us to make it structurally sound. Honestly, it's become one of our favourite kinds of project.
What vibe coding actually is
The term comes from Andrej Karpathy, a well-known AI researcher, who described it in a post in February 2025: you tell the AI what you want in plain language, you try it, you ask for changes, and you don't look too closely at the code it writes. Collins Dictionary picked it as 2025's word of the year in November, defining it as the use of AI prompted by natural language to help write code. That's not a niche hobbyist thing any more, it's how a lot of small Irish businesses are getting a first version of a website online.
Why we actually like it
Not the line most agencies give you, so here's the honest version. A client who's vibe-coded something hasn't shown us a mood board or a Pinterest link, they've shown us a working thing, with their own words, their own structure, their own idea of what matters on the homepage, already decided. That changes the job.
- We're not guessing at a brief, we're reading one you've already built. Weeks of "is this roughly what you meant" disappear, because you've already made the decisions a brief usually tries to capture secondhand.
- The site ends up looking like what you actually wanted, not our interpretation of it filtered through a discovery call. That's a better outcome for you.
- It's collaborative in a way a from-scratch build often isn't. You're not handing over a project and waiting four weeks, you're sitting with us while we explain what needs strengthening and why, on something you already understand because you built it.
The pattern we see most often: someone builds a landing page or a small shop over a weekend, it looks good, and then a question stops them before they tell anyone it exists. Is this actually secure. Will Google ever find it. What happens if it breaks on a Saturday. Those are good questions to stop on, and they're the exact three things the tool itself has no opinion on.
What "finishing" it actually means
This is the part that doesn't show up in a five-minute demo, and it's not a knock on the tools, it's just not what they're built to do.
- Who owns it, and where does it live. A lot of these tools host the result themselves. Before anything else, we check the domain is registered to you, not the platform, and that the finished site can live on hosting you actually control.
- Structure underneath the page. Proper heading hierarchy, a sitemap, a robots.txt file, a title tag that describes the page rather than just naming your brand. None of this is visible when you look at the site, which is exactly why it gets missed.
- Security, properly checked. API keys that shouldn't be visible in the browser, forms with no validation, permissions set wider than they need to be. We go through this methodically rather than hoping it's fine.
- Accessibility. The European Accessibility Act has applied in Ireland since 28 June 2025, and it covers e-commerce. A site that looks finished can still fail it quietly.
- Performance, once there's real traffic. AI tools build for the demo, not for a hundred people hitting the contact form on the same morning. Images that weren't compressed, no caching set up, queries that work fine with ten test records and slow down with ten thousand real ones.
- A plan for when something breaks. Not "ask the AI again", an actual person who can read the code and fix it.
We've gone through the evidence on where AI-built sites specifically fall down, security research, accessibility testing, the lot, in detail in an earlier post. Worth a read if you want the receipts rather than taking our word for it.
What it costs to get there
Most of the time this isn't a rebuild, it's a structured check followed by fixes. It's the same shape as our Website NCT: a fixed-price diagnosis of what's actually wrong, at €99, with the fixes quoted separately once we know what they are. Sometimes that's an afternoon's work at €100 + VAT an hour. Occasionally the honest answer is that what you've built isn't salvageable underneath, and a rebuild is cheaper than patching it, and we'll say so plainly rather than bill you to find that out slowly.
AI is the future, and we're not pretending otherwise
We're not precious about this. The tools are good, they're improving fast, and pretending otherwise would be a worse look than admitting it. What's changed is the job, not whether there's a job. Less time spent typing out a first draft, more time spent on the part that was always the harder half anyway: knowing what's actually safe to launch, what Google can find, what the law requires, and what to do the day something stops working. That's where a developer still earns their place, not instead of the AI, alongside it.
If you've vibe-coded something and want an honest read on what's underneath it, talk to us. We'll tell you straight, including when the answer is that you've nothing to worry about.