The day before I announced Crawlspace, I shared a link to the tool with the His Majesty the Worm Discord server. I received an encouragingly enthusiastic response from the community there, which made me feel good about posting a wider announcement. I also received a very mild bit of pushback, from someone who correctly noted that the tool looked like a lot of work had gone into it, and asked me if I’d vibe coded it.
I accept that “vibe code” has a spectrum of meanings, right now. I tend to use it narrowly, referring to a software creation process driven by prompting an LLM with your demands and looking immediately for executable output: no design effort going in, no review of the generated code, and no personal taste exercised before shipping. The software equivalent of not caring if your “S” is upside-down or not, in other words. But, I know others use the term to describe any application of generative AI assistance into a coding process at all—no matter the degree of it, or the level of human oversight.
And so, to the question about Crawlspace and vibe coding, just saying “No” didn’t feel right. A genAI assistant—Claude Code—did indeed play a significant role, generating all the JavaScript code that makes Crawlspace work. But it did so only according to my overall vision and iterative direction, with every step subject to my review of both the code and the in-browser result. It’s not what I call vibe coding, but it’s probably what others would. So that’s how I responded, linking to the project’s AI disclosure as well.
The other pressed the question, though: Only the JavaScript? What about the colors chosen?
That’s when it finally clicked for me what they were getting at. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “the colors and such at present have some Claude-default patina to them, since I’ve put less attention on those details for now.”
“Ah, so I wasn’t just imagining that last part!” they replied. “Claude sure loves brown and gold.”
On this, I could only agree, responding with “🤎💛” reaction emojis, and so ended the exchange, amicably enough. But a lingering, bad feeling stuck with me afterwards. I felt a little stung, as if I’d received a harsher critique than the one that person had actually offered.
Hours later, the answer came to me. By not making a visible effort to apply an overall style sensibility beyond Claude’s honey-tinged defaults, I burdened Crawlspace with the signal of vibe coding according to my own, stricter definition. From an AI-critical perspective, it has all the signs of slop.
When I come across an online article illustrated with sloppy AI-generated artwork, I often find myself questioning whether the accompanying text is human-produced. And by the same principle, any person visiting Crawlspace with a certain kind of AI-critical eye would have every reason to see its chocolate-colored, round-cornered, gold-trimmed window elements on a velvet background, and immediately suspect that the whole website was pooped out using a million tokens and a lazy afternoon.
I leave Crawlspace in its telltale earthtones for now; maybe I’ll give it a design refresh later, or maybe I’ll just leave it as a reminder-lesson for my future self. But from now on, if I am to continue using generative AI code assistants while resisting the label of vibe coder, I should at least wash the mud off of Claude’s default color palette with my next projects.
“Honey Bee & Gray Nickerbean” by bob in swamp is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .