Tilda’s CEO on vibe coding: brilliant for micro-SaaS, pointless for landing pages
Vibe coding is having a moment. Every week there is a new demo of someone building a full web app by typing plain English into a chat window. It looks impressive. But Nikita Obukhov, founder and CEO of website-building platform Tilda, has a more grounded read on where this technology actually helps operators and where it quietly costs them more time than it saves.
His core position: vibe coding is the right tool for micro-SaaS. For landing pages and simple sales material, it’s the wrong one. Here is why.
️ What vibe coding actually is (and what it is not)
The term covers a wide range of experiences. At the simple end, you ask a chat interface to generate code and get plain HTML back. At the complex end, an agent builds a full multi-file site, spins up a local environment so you can test, and connects to databases if you need dynamic data.
The key distinction Obukhov draws is infrastructure ownership. With vibe coding, you work in your own environment: you pick a hosting service and deploy, or you set up a virtual server yourself. With a website builder, everything stays inside the platform’s ecosystem. Same underlying models in many cases, fundamentally different operational responsibility.
Vibe coding brings in editing by voice: you tell the agent in text or out loud what you want, and the agent generates it. It’s genuinely new.
Where the infrastructure gap bites you
Most people who start with vibe coding do not anticipate what comes with owning your own environment. Obukhov points to two issues that trip operators up fast.
Image delivery. Best practice is to serve images from a CDN. So now you have to figure out CDN deployment on top of everything else. A website builder handles this automatically and invisibly.
DDoS protection. Any business with public visibility is a target. Taking down a site on an ordinary VPS is, in Obukhov’s words, very easy. Cloudflare has a nominally free tier, but it is still a decision you have to make consciously and set up correctly. On a website builder, it is handled for you.
⏱️ The iteration time problem
The biggest practical friction with vibe coding is not skill level. It is wait time between iterations.
Obukhov is direct about this: changing a button color takes five seconds in a visual interface. In a prompt-driven workflow, you write the instruction, the model thinks, it regenerates the relevant styles, and you wait. That might be a minute for a trivial change. Multiply that across a full design pass and the time savings disappear fast.
Sometimes it’s very hard to make exactly the change an interface would let you make easily. Explaining in a prompt that you want this changed to that can be devilishly hard.
Obukhov sees the practical resolution as a hybrid: use vibe coding to get the first result, then refine through a visual interface. Tilda has shipped a tool called Vibe Block that follows exactly this model: you generate blocks or entire pages from a prompt, then edit graphically from there.
Security risks operators tend to underestimate
This is where Obukhov is most direct, and it is worth taking seriously.
A static site that only displays content carries low risk. But the moment your vibe-coded site processes orders, handles form submissions, or accumulates user data, the exposure becomes, in his words, a certainty rather than a possibility.
A neural network is a roulette wheel — it can hit the jackpot or lose everything. It’s much the same here.
Two specific failure modes to watch:
- Silent breakage. A model update or internal error can take a working project to non-working with no clear explanation. You may not notice until something important stops working in production.
- Code you cannot audit. If you are storing personal data or processing payments and you did not write the code yourself, you may not fully understand what it does. That creates legal and reputational risk for anyone who trusted you with their information. Obukhov cites the online store case specifically: price calculations, stock checks, and payment flows are areas where vibe-coded output carries serious risk.
When to use vibe coding, when to skip it
Obukhov’s framework is clean:
- Use vibe coding for micro-SaaS. Building a small tool with specific logic, custom interactions, or a novel workflow: this is where vibe coding earns its hype. A site builder cannot give you the same flexibility here.
- Skip vibe coding for landing pages and simple sales material. A website builder is faster, cheaper, and safer. Permissions management, role-based editing access, image optimization, and hosting are all handled without you thinking about them. The vibe-coded version requires you to solve each of these from scratch.
- Never vibe-code an online store without serious technical review. Obukhov would not risk it. Those are his words, not a paraphrase.
The honest verdict on website builders’ future
Obukhov does not claim the website builder category is immune to disruption. He describes the moment honestly as a zone of discomfort and stress for every platform in the space, Tilda included. New top-tier models arrive every six months, and capabilities that looked impossible a year ago are now generated at stable quality.
But he does not think website builders disappear. For the ordinary entrepreneur running a small business, the operational complexity of vibe coding is a tax they do not want to pay. They have other things to do. So they will use a builder regardless, even as the builders themselves absorb vibe coding features into their products.
The practical takeaway for operators: know which category your project falls into before you choose your tooling. A micro-SaaS tool with custom logic belongs in a vibe coding workflow. A landing page for your next product launch does not.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
