Will Vibe Coding Replace Web Designers? What It Actually Means for Your Business

Vibe coding is everywhere — Lovable, Base44, Claude Code, and a flood of Facebook ads promising "your website in 2 minutes." For designers, it's unsettling: these tools really can spin up a decent-looking site fast. So are they devaluing our work, or freeing us up for the work that actually matters? In this episode, Olga (Applet Studio) and Wayne (Resonant Pixel Co) get honest about where AI website builders help, where they fall apart, and what it all means for the future of design as a business. They dig into why AI-built sites are often "disposable" rather than real business engines, the missing CMS problem, why the copy is usually the weak link, and how the low end of the web design market is genuinely under threat. But it's not all doom — they also cover the shift designers need to make: from pixel-pushing to strategy, business development, and building community and confidence that AI can't replicate. Plus a few practical wins: using Squarespace's brand settings to get genuinely good AI-generated draft copy, why giving clients copy to edit beats asking them for a blank-page draft, and the third-party workarounds (Zapier, Airtable, n8n) for populating repetitive pages at scale. — What we cover — • The rise of vibe coding and AI website builders • Why AI sites are "disposable," not business systems • The missing CMS and messy-edit problem • Is AI devaluing design work? (yes and no) • Why the low end of the market is most at risk • Selling shovels in a gold rush • Pivoting from pixel-pushing to strategy and community • Getting good AI copy out of Squarespace's brand settings • Why clients edit copy but won't write it • Workarounds for repetitive pages at scale Well Spaced is a podcast from Applet Studio and Resonant Pixel Co about design, business, and building online.