thoughts from vibing a photo site

So I vibe-coded a photo site, in the truest sense of the term: aside from a few naming edits and obviously the album + copy itself, I wrote exactly 0% of the code by hand. Some of the code, I barely even read. In all, the LLM wrote:

• The website itself, which is a static website driven by astro. The output is entirely vanilla: plain HTML, css, js.
• CDK code for the hosting infrastructure, S3 + Cloudfront.
• Utility scripts, mostly python, for workflow: collating image names, working exif data, bulk upload, etc.

How did it go?

This is the exact type of “nice to have” project that would have been too much of a pain to do without LLMs. Most of the vibing happened in the in-between times: waiting for claude to crunch on harder problems, in between cooking dinner, etc. As a testament to the progress of LLMs, I vaguely recall attempting something like this back in 2024 and the results were not nearly good enough to publish. (Right, yes, I could have gotten it there, but again, too much of a pain.) This time, prompting more or less Just Worked on both the astro site as well as the more finicky CDK code.

Does this mean the AI is coming for our jobs? At time of writing in early 2026, I’d still lean no. Despite prompting “just working,” it was heavily helped by my ~two decades of experience writing software. I had to steer it a lot: from little things like “include a requirements.txt for python and update .tool-versions” to big things like “dropping to L1 CDK constructs seems really dumb here, are you sure this is the issue.”

… Then there’s the obvious fact that this is a photo site. I would absolutely not take this approach to production code, and barring some extinction-level jumps in model intelligence, I’m not sure I’ll ever get there. So can we count this photo site as “productivity gainz”? Technically, sure, I guess? But when pundits reference the 10x+ productivity jump, they usually mean serious software with economic value.

The Great Deployment Filter

The biggest friction point, and where technical experience really comes into play, is in the deployment. Vibing a S3+Cloudfront setup only works because I’m masochistic enough to already have a personal AWS account managed via CDK, and know CDK well enough to see that Claude is not doing something completely deranged. I recognize that running your own AWS is… slightly unusual, even for developer-y types. In contrast, a non-technical person would have had to figure out, from scratch, hosting for photo assets and deployment for the site itself. We quickly go from “speak english to claude” to “here’s a list of clouds, glhfdd” And this is just for a static html website — no external APIs, OAuth integrations, etc making life even harder.

Insofar as we want LLMs to lower the barrier to entry for shipping software, deployment and runtime is still one of the biggest constraints right now.