I hate everything I vibe-coded. Here they are.

By James Pain | 10 November 2026ai, codingNot written by AI

Grid of identical orange slot machines titled Claude. Each machine shows 7, 7, 7 on its pay line.

Vibe-coded projects look like vibe-coded projects.

I hate these projects. I've spent weeks of time on them feeling like a god of creation, a genius of creativity, and I've come away feeling dissatisfied and frustrated.

I've been lying to myself that I was building these. These projects have very little of me in them. Maybe they have a small kernel of my idea in the middle, but it's so deeply buried by layers of generic crap that you wouldn't be able to tell.

Here are my skeletons in the closet of abandoned AI projects.

Collectable Card Game - Specimens

Could AI build a Collectable Card Game, but digital and free?

Specimens Mobile Demo — Video demo of mobile gameplay. No audio.

Claude built this based on Conway's Game of Life. Each round, a random grid of cells plays out by Life’s rules, and any shapes left standing become your cards.

Block card: four glowing yellow cells in a square. Common. "Four cells, no ambition, and it will outlast everything you love." — **Common** found almost every round

Paperclip card: a glowing teal loop of cells. Rare. "Holds nothing together and looks very pleased about it." — **Common** found almost every round

I thought it was going to be my App Store debut, a non-toxic mobile game with no ads and no loot boxes. All the kids and parents will love it. I might be a millionaire. I was a genius.

I took a break from the project for a day and came back to it with fresh eyes.

Everything about it feels like AI. There's explanatory and reassuring copy everywhere. Border radius on every corner. IBM Plex Sans font. Small 'eyebrow' labels above sections.

There are also intangible traits that are hard to point to. The choices of when to use bold, italics, colours, symbols, layouts, and much more. These are AI smells. If I came across this app, I'd be instantly put off by it.

I spent so much time trying to clean it all up, but taking out is so much more difficult than putting in. At that point, my enthusiasm had died and it felt like a lost cause. I abandoned it after 60 hours of work.

Perpetually Generated TV Network - Forever Now

Could AI create a 24/7 Twitch channel?

An infinite live stream channel with soap operas, sitcoms, and stand up comedy, run by AI. AI agents would create sets, characters, props, voice, sound effects. Practically everything.

I've been keen to do some kind of 24/7 live stream project, inspired by Nothing Forever, Hey's 2020 Dumpster Fire, Figure 03 sorting packages, and Drummond Puddle Watch.

A basic 3D scene of a character on a stand-up comedy stage in the spotlight, surrounded by an audience sitting at cabaret-seating-style tables with lit candles. Subtitle says the following. Priya Nott. I say, "You're all doctors in a hospital," and within four seconds one of them is doing surgery on a chair. — Scene from 'The Undercroft', the stand up comedy programme

God damn, let me tell you, the script writing sucked. None of it had any substance. Episodes weren't remotely interesting. You could say the same for Nothing Forever, but at least it was ironically funny. Forever Now was just sad and empty.

Claude spent 80% of the time on this project improving the script writing. It developed a complex system of story arcs, programme bibles, review workflows, and punch-ups. None of that helped. Abandoned after about 85 hours.

VSCode Narrate

Could I pair-program with AI?

Obviously you can prompt AI and wait for its results, but I wanted the experience of pair programming with another person. One person drives, the other person steers.

I found it pretty impressive how quickly it could react, <1 sec from voice to action. It was admittedly quite jumpy and over eager, but that wasn't the main problem.

At speed, it was quite dumb. I wanted a coding partner rather than just someone who took specific well-defined actions.

Cool proof of concept. It may work one day, but not today. Abandoned after 2 hours.

Rolling News - Runtime

Could AI make a rolling news channel for IT professionals?

Runtime Demo - GitHub Story — Multi-view demo of the Runtime recording UI. No audio.

Like Bloomberg TV but for tech, focusing on vulnerabilities, outages, and releases of the day. AI writes the stories, human talent would read the teleprompter, AI would record, edit, and publish it.

This is another project that failed due to the prose writing ability of AI. I had AI agents gather news, do research, cite sources, and then build a news segment script. It never came out sounding normal.

All of its graphics were pre-generic as far as AI generation goes. It had all the traits, even that specific colour of orange that I keep seeing everywhere.

Business Website

Could AI build my business website?

The Signal Rate homepage: a near-black page covered in a faint pattern of hash and plus characters, a red "Available for engagements, Q4 2026" status line above the headline "I build and fix software projects.", a red email button, and four outlined badges for Cyber Essentials, BCS membership, ICO registration and professional indemnity. — The Signal Rate homepage

Signal Rate is my freelancing company and I wanted a website for it. This is what broke me. I thought I was being cool and quirky by creating a techy looking website with Claude. Look at me, I'm totally a developer. Look at all the cool impressive hacker-like things. Wohhh.

Actually what this website demonstrates is laziness and a lack of any kind of independent thought. I've seen every element repeated on other vibe-coded websites. The fonts, background, layout, the weird status strap above the title.

It does nothing to give customers a personal impression, which is what a freelance dev needs for a website. It is the worst website in the world. It reminds me of the catering websites referenced in If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you.

So, what have I learnt from this?

AI isn't good at everything. It's very tempting to use AI at a high abstract level. Much like fast food, it's addictive and feels good at the time, but I end up regretting it.

My reality check came when I found a website that was obviously vibe coded. It contained almost every trait that I had in my own projects.

Generative AI is an amazing technology, but I think it needs to be used in moderation to avoid creating slop. Small requests with a well defined beginning and end are perfect.

Thanks for reading

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