Is bbc.com vibe coded?

Reading this score

bbc.com landed on 10/100, which puts it in the hand-written band. That number is not a percentage and not a probability — it is strength of evidence: 28 points of tells, damped by craft, less 39 points of deliberate decisions, mapped through one logistic curve.

What pushed it up

• Accessibility gaps +12 — 67 images with no alt. Adding these requires knowing why they matter.
• Dependency sprawl +8 — 6 third-party asset hosts and 60 script files. Each sub-problem got whatever library was most popular in the training data, and nothing was ever consolidated.
• Fixed pixel widths that will overflow a phone +8 — Hard pixel widths wider than a phone. Layouts break at sizes nobody prompted for, because desktop was the only viewport that got looked at.

What pulled it down

• Skip-to-content link −9 — A keyboard skip link exists. Generators do not do this.
• Hand-written ARIA −7 — 120 explicit accessibility attributes.
• Self-hosted typography −7 — Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled off a CDN.
• Structured data −6 — JSON-LD is present — somebody thought about search.
• Semantic landmarks −6 — 6 landmark elements instead of a pile of divs.
• Canonical URL −4 — Canonical link is set.

Craft we looked for and did not find

These are the actionable half of the report. None of them are hard, and every one of them would have moved the number.

• Deliberate social preview
• prefers-reduced-motion honoured
• CSS custom property system
• Hand-authored stylesheet
• No utility-class soup

What this scan cannot see

One request, no JavaScript executed. So everything below is invisible to us, and a page can be excellent or awful at all of it without moving the score:

• Domain registration age — needs WHOIS.
• Whether the nav's /about and /pricing actually resolve — needs a crawl, not one fetch.
• package.json dependency count, orphaned code, clashing abstractions, test coverage — needs the repo.
• Backend security shortcuts: string-built SQL, verify=False, missing auth on endpoints — needs the source.
• Whether row-level security or Firebase rules are actually switched on — needs the project.
• Console errors, hydration warnings and runtime 404s — needs a browser executing the page.
• Real Lighthouse numbers and horizontal scroll at 375px — needs a rendered viewport.
• Whether a JS-handled form posts anywhere — needs a submitted request.