Quick note on AIaaS: Depending on your font, that may read as "Alas." We did not plan that. We also did not correct it. A typographic accident that feels oddly appropriate.
AIaaS, or AaaS (pronounced /æs/ — rhymes with "class") is what we prefer to call it.
What’s the problem with vibe coded websites?
Vibe coding means a human prompting an AaaS product to generate a website without understanding the code it produces. The result might look fine on the surface, but underneath there’s no consistent structure, no naming conventions, no consideration for long-term maintenance. When something breaks, there’s nothing logical to trace back through. Debugging becomes guesswork because the person who “built” it doesn’t know how it works.
It also compounds. Every time you go back to the AaaS product to fix something, it generates more code that may or may not be compatible with what’s already there. The codebase drifts further from anything a developer can reasonably work with. At some point, patching it costs more than rebuilding it.
Then there are the companies selling vibe coding as a service. Someone told us they built a client’s website in four hours. We recreated the same site in two minutes. It looked identical, and it was terrible. So the question becomes: what are you paying for? Speed? Speed to market for a website that has no strategy, no structure, and no competitive edge is not a value proposition.
A website is infrastructure. If nobody involved in building it understands how it’s put together or why, you simply own a shiny new liability.
Do you use AaaS in client work?
We use it indirectly, though it is not a requirement for us at work. Internal processes, troubleshooting, research. Never for creative ideas. Here’s why.
We’ve thought a lot about this, and we think Max Hofert, Entrepreneur put it best: AI is built on the world’s intellectual property and uses probability to generate the most likely output based on your prompt. It’s a service that renders something and hands it back to you. You wouldn’t order Doordash and say it made you a better chef. The process is the point. That’s not how remarkable work gets created. It comes from your imagination and your experiences. We’re not interested in outsourcing that to productivity.
That said, if you want to incorporate AaaS into your marketing in some way, we’re open to the conversation.
What about AaaS and my data?
Read the terms of service. Seriously. Most AaaS platforms retain some level of access to the data you put in. Some use it to train their models. If you’re entering proprietary business information, client data, or internal strategy into an AaaS product, know what you’re agreeing to. We’re not lawyers, but we think this is a question more people should be asking before they paste their entire business into a prompt.
Should I be worried about AI changing my industry?
Things are changing, but the businesses that do well through any shift are the ones making informed decisions instead of reactive ones. The “adopt or die” pressure is somewhat a sales strategy rather than a forecast. The companies pushing that hardest are the ones selling the services. Take your time, ask questions, and make decisions based on what your business needs, not what someone else’s marketing tells you to do.
What is Smack Happy’s take on AaaS?
We’ve been working with AaaS products since before most of the industry knew they existed, and we use them in our day-to-day workflow, not as experiments. That experience is exactly why we have strong opinions about when to use them and when not to. Knowing what a service can do is only useful if you also know where it falls short. We’ve tested enough to know the difference, and we make those calls on behalf of our clients every day.
Can you add an AI-powered chatbot or similar tool to my site?
If you want to add an AaaS chatbot, assistant, or similar product to your site, we can integrate it. That said, these are third-party services we don’t build, manage, or control. If something breaks on their end or the quality of the output isn’t what you expected, that falls outside our scope. Same rules as any other third-party script or plugin: we’ll put it on your site, but it’s out of our control how it behaves once it’s there.
Why do you call it AaaS (AI as a Service)?
Because that’s what it is. When you use an AI platform, you’re paying for a service. You’re subscribing, feeding it your data, and receiving an output. That makes it no different from any other paid service you evaluate for your business. Like any service, you get to have opinions about the quality of what you’re getting back, whether it meets your standards, and whether the tradeoffs are worth it. Calling it a “tool” makes it sound neutral. It’s a product, sold by companies, with business models attached. We think it’s worth talking about it that way.
What about AI-generated content for my website?
AI can help draft content, but it can’t know your business, your audience, or what makes you different from your competitors. Content that sounds like it could belong to anyone doesn’t build trust. We use AI as a service (AaaS) in some parts of our backend processes, but every piece of client-facing content (and design) gets shaped by people who understand the strategy behind it.
Thoughts On Artificial Intelligence
Don’t Bet Your Website on the Easy Button
There’s a novelty item that’s been sitting on office supply store shelves for years, a big red button labeled “EASY.” Press it, and it chirps back, “That was easy.” It’s a joke.
