Imagine the owner of a small ceramics studio — call her Anna. One evening she opens Tilda, writes a couple of sentences about her work and hits “Generate”. After a while something very much like a website appears on screen: a hero with a beautiful cup, benefits, testimonials, a “Book a workshop” button. It looks so convincing that it’s easy to believe the job is done and she can go to bed.
Anna is fictional; the tools are real. Tilda can generate a page from a business description and has a vibe block that builds a page from a chat prompt. I’m not very interested in arguing whether that’s good or bad. I’m interested in what Anna actually has by morning. Generation is good at what you can see: layout, styling, draft copy. A site as a product also includes what stays invisible until someone uses it — data, states, ties to other services and testing. That’s the part I want to talk about.
What generation actually creates
Tilda’s description of generating a page from scratch is quite specific. You set the topic, briefly describe the company and goal, the system suggests structure, generates blocks, picks accent colors and images. Then you can edit manually or publish. A vibe page follows a different path: the whole page lives in one vibe block split into sections, edited via “Chat” or “Content”.
In both cases you get a layout filled with text and images. That’s a lot. A draft you can open, show colleagues and discuss appears before anyone sits down to design. It’s much easier to talk about taste and structure on a live page than in a message thread.
But the content comes from what you said and what the model found plausible. Tilda’s docs say plainly that content is produced by a third-party service, the platform can’t guarantee truth or uniqueness, and you must verify the result yourself. So Anna’s page might show convincing testimonials from students who never existed and lines about “years of experience” for a studio that opened last spring. It looks exactly like the truth — and that’s the hard part.
How an AI prototype differs from a finished site
A generated page answers “what will it look like?” well. A finished site must also answer “what happens when people start using it?” The gap lives in states you don’t see on a pretty screenshot.
Take that “Book” button. Where does the request go, who sees it, what does the person read after submitting, what if they typo their phone or book twice when the workshop is full? In a vibe block the form has a “Services” button to hook up Tilda CRM or other receivers. The button exists; deciding where requests must land and checking they really arrive is still on a human.
If Anna sells cups on the site, there are more states: out of stock, price changed, filter returned nothing, a long product title broke the card on mobile. The generator shows the ideal case — everything in stock, short titles. A site spends most of its life in non-ideal cases.
Where data, integrations and testing remain
Data is the least visible part of the AI-site conversation. Prices, stock, schedules and delivery terms live somewhere — in accounting, a spreadsheet, sometimes only in a manager’s head. Generation fills fields once. A site runs for years; someone must know where each number comes from and who updates it. If nobody maintains pages and catalog, that’s separate work — usually called customization and content — and a business brief doesn’t cancel it.
Integrations add their own rules. Payment, delivery, CRM, analytics — each service has settings, access and limits, wired to how the company works. A model may write block code, but it can’t decide which request counts as paid or what to do when the courier API is silent.
Who maintains generated code is another question. Vibe-block docs say editing code may need basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and Tilda support doesn’t advise on code. Converting a vibe block to Zero Block is still beta; design may shift, and you can’t convert Zero back to vibe. I wouldn’t conclude the tool is unusable — but the path you chose affects how you’ll edit the page six months later.
Finally, testing. Someone must open the site on an old phone and slow connection, submit the form and see the lead where it’s expected. The generator won’t do that; it builds the page, people live with it.
When you have a page but not yet a site
If AI gave you a handsome page and next come forms, calculations and integrations — that’s my lane. You can come with a generated draft: we’ll see what to keep and what to rebuild.
What you can’t get from a single business description
Tilda’s page generator allows at most 700 characters including spaces for the business description — roughly two or three short paragraphs like this. Anna can fit the topic, a couple of facts and a general wish. Almost everything that makes one ceramics studio different from the next won’t fit.
Who comes to her workshops and what they hesitate about before booking. Whether she cares more about striking design or editing pages herself without a developer. What can wait and what blocks launch. How to handle personal data from the form. Each question needs a choice between options, and choice needs context that isn’t in the brief.
The model then picks the most probable option, like many sites in the same niche. Sometimes that’s enough. Often the business needs a variant that fits them — only someone who knows the context can tell it apart from the default.
Can AI replace a developer?
On my homepage AI tools sit alongside custom logic and integrations, so I won’t pit them against each other. Models already take a noticeable share of manual work: first draft, layout option, a piece of code, text review. A simple one-page site with one form is something an owner can build alone if they check everything carefully.
What changes first, I think, is the developer’s job. Less time drawing and assembling, more deciding how the site should behave and proving it does. Tilda again asks you to verify generated output yourself. The question is who “yourself” is on the project.
For Anna with one page and one form, the answer may be simple: she is. When the site gets calculations, a catalog with live data, several services and people operating them, responsibility has to land somewhere explicit. A page generated in an evening isn’t worse for that. It stays what it was: a good draft and a reason to talk about the site seriously.