Is the explosion of "vibe coding" sites in Monero good or bad?

It's obvious that more and more websites are getting produced due to the power of AI coding tools. "Vibe coding," which I would define as: describing what you want in plain English and letting the AI generate the code, is now the dominate way people are creating code.

Like any tool, there are people who can use it well and those who have no background with the end result and make a mess. Despite the very negative tone some people have with this coding style, many of the most respected programmers in the world, like Uncle Bob Martin, are acknowledging the power of this and saying it finally allows them to write all those unit and integration tests they never got a chance to write.

So, vibe coding is not good or bad by itself. And for practically every website out there, no one looks at the code anyway, so why do people care so much? It really seems to come down to the consistent styles and patterns that AI creates visually. I do not think people are hating on vibe coding, they are just sick of seeing certain CSS that keeps getting reused.

In seeing submissions to Monerica, practically every new site is vibe coded and the style if redundant. You can even argue some of the sites Monerica makes are in this style. But looking beyond purely the visual side of it, which is what people seem so hung up on, do more sites in Monero solve more problems?

I would say that more sites may in fact make more problems than they solve. The amount of VCC (virtual credit card)/ reloadable no-KYC sites is high. These are very often scams and allowing them to churn out is not good for users. There are also a lot of new instant swaps that all look the same. This isn't by itself bad, but it makes the proliferation of bad sites easier.

Is it good or bad to have more vibe coding sites? I think it's a bit of both. There are some interesting sites and projects people have made that are vibe coded, ones that check Monero stats like: https://monerometrics.net/ and then you will have all these scammy sites luring people in to get reloadable cards.

For me personally, it has empowered me to work at a speed much faster than I thought possible, like having an entire company under me to build sites. But I do understand the style and CSS patterns getting repeated again and again, and people who have no background in making sites making them.

Hi,

Found your post while working on the site's SEO!

I'm the guy behind monerometrics.net :)

Thanks for the shoutout! Glad to see the site mentioned as one of the interesting projects.

Context: This started out as my final-year uni project: we had total freedom on the topic, and being into Monero, it ticked every box for my exam. I come from an On-Premise background and I am pivoting to Cloud, DevOps, and Infrastructure Security, so frontend web development is way outside my focus.

Since I don't have a traditional dev background, I leaned heavily on Claude Opus across the board, mostly for the React dashboard UI, documentation, and multi-language support (like Spanish, which I don't speak at all). It was also an awesome learning booster: it helped me wrap my head around complex concepts much faster by breaking them down using analogies and custom Mermaid diagrams tailored to how I learn best.

I still spent hundreds of hours on building features, testing, auditing generated code, and refining the architecture.

I was alone facing the examiners during my oral defense (no AI), answering questions to justify everything I had pushed to production.

Using AI allowed me to accelerate delivery and focus my energy where it truly counted for the examiners: understanding the underlying principles and architecting a hardened, resilient infrastructure (designing a K3s cluster topology, node failover strategy, a zero-trust security framework, etc).

Either way, I think we've fallen down a rabbit hole where pretty much every techie is going to be using AI moving forward. As for the broader debate around AI tools in crypto, lowering the barrier to entry is great for letting people build cool tools that boost Monero's visibility.

That said, I totally agree that AI coding brings two big concerns:

• Security risks: Beyond buggy logic, a massive risk with AI is accidental secret exposure and sloppy security configurations. I was extremely careful with secret management (making sure no credentials ever leaked into prompts or code) and keeping the attack surface minimal (the site is purely read-only network analytics with no user data, no logins, and zero XMR handling). For anything touching keys or funds though, unvetted AI code is a huge red flag.

• Proliferation of scams: Because spinning up a decent-looking frontend is so easy now, scammers can churn out fake VCC or swap sites in minutes. It's not unique to Monero, but it definitely means our ecosystem needs stronger reputation systems, curation tools, and open-source audits.

Thanks again for the feedback! :)