Worked examples nytimes.com
Is nytimes.com vibe coded?
A newsroom's front page, under real constraints. We fetched the homepage on 29 August 2026 and ran all 86 detectors over the raw HTML — the same scan you get from the box on the front page, frozen here so the numbers can be argued with.
www.nytimes.com
Hand-written
Somebody sat down and made decisions. Several of them were opinions.
- Vibe tells
- 3
- Craft tells
- 8
- Confidence
- high
Plenty of signal to work with.
Where the score came from
- Platform fingerprintsnone
Artefacts of the tool, not of taste
- Colour, type and surfacenone
The visual defaults, applied unedited
- Layout and architecture1 hit
The shape a page takes when nobody asks what it needs to say
- Copy tellsnone
How the words were written
- Leftoversnone
Scaffolding never cleaned up
- Source and build1 hit
What is visible in the shipped code
- How it behaves1 hit
Weight, mobile, accessibility, SEO — where the money leaks
- Human craft8 hits
Evidence of deliberate decisions
Evidence
11 findings- −9
Deliberate social preview
Open Graph title and image were both authored.
- −9
Skip-to-content link
A keyboard skip link exists. Generators do not do this.
- +8
Fixed pixel widths that will overflow a phone
Hard pixel widths wider than a phone. Layouts break at sizes nobody prompted for, because desktop was the only viewport that got looked at.
- min-width:740px
- min-width:1024px
- min-width:1150px
- width:1200px
- +7
Everything centred
6 centred blocks. Long centred text is measurably harder to read, and with no left-aligned anchor the hierarchy flattens.
- −7
Hand-written ARIA
21 explicit accessibility attributes.
- −7
No utility-class soup
Not one Tailwind utility class in the markup.
What we read
- title
- The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos
- generator
- —
- server
- envoy
- status
- 200
- html
- 893.8 KB
- words
- 1,119
- fetched in
- 1302 ms
Reading this score
nytimes.com landed on 4/100, which puts it in the hand-written band. That number is not a percentage and not a probability — it is strength of evidence: 16 points of tells, damped by craft, less 54 points of deliberate decisions, mapped through one logistic curve.
What pushed it up
- 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.
- Everything centred +7 — 6 centred blocks. Long centred text is measurably harder to read, and with no left-aligned anchor the hierarchy flattens.
- Generic naming in the shipped script +5 — Names that describe the container instead of the contents.
What pulled it down
- Deliberate social preview −9 — Open Graph title and image were both authored.
- Skip-to-content link −9 — A keyboard skip link exists. Generators do not do this.
- Hand-written ARIA −7 — 21 explicit accessibility attributes.
- No utility-class soup −7 — Not one Tailwind utility class in the markup.
- Structured data −6 — JSON-LD is present — somebody thought about search.
- Semantic landmarks −6 — 5 landmark elements instead of a pile of divs.
- CSS custom property system −6 — 135 CSS custom properties — a real token layer.
- 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.
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.