Vibe Coding Alert! How I Rebuilt a Wix Site and Fed the “AI Will End SaaS” Panic

My better half is an artist and maintains a Wix.com site. For the second time in two years, Wix decided to raise the hosting fees. That’s when I suggested to my spouse that I could rebuild the website and host it on Firebase (where I host most of my projects). I assumed this wouldn’t be a big deal (I was wrong) and started researching ways to use a lightweight CMS with Firebase support. Such a system exists — it’s called FireCMS — and it’s excellent.

Before I dive deeper, here’s her original site (no longer a paid Wix site):  Miyuki's WIX site

Her instructions were clear: replicate it as closely as possible. So I went to work. I created a product development document with use cases, scope, screenshots from the original site, the required features, and of course FireCMS integration. I used ChatGPT to draft the document, then set up a new Firebase instance, and finally launched the Vibe Coding agent (Claude Code).

The process wasn’t too different from my other projects, but what surprised me was how much I actually learned this time. When reviewing code or asking questions like “how would I do that?” or “what’s the best way to achieve this?”, I often got insightful answers that introduced me to tools, features, and practices I hadn’t known about. In short, I gained a much deeper understanding of Firebase, especially its storage facilities (which I used for the images of her paintings), user permissions, Google ID integration, and whitelisting.

But the biggest breakthrough was discovering that I could embed structured data directly into a site’s header using Schema.org Naturally, I went ahead and did exactly that.

So, what’s the outcome of this roughly 5-day effort spread across 5 weeks? I built an open-source content management system for artists — anyone familiar with Firebase and Angular can use it. Her new website (completely free) is now live here:

 https://www.tribecaconcepts.com

And the source code is available on GitHub:

 https://github.com/ugubser/artcms

It’s another example of “vibe coding.” I didn’t write a single line of code or documentation — I only reviewed it, ensuring we avoided storing API keys or other sensitive data in the repo.

If you’re familiar with Firebase, I’d love to know whether you can spin up your own instance just by following the instructions. Let me know in the comments here.