@pb-ai-allegations has been made regarding PB devs proudly Midjourney, the site possibly being vibe coded, horridly unoptimized to the point where no human would make the decisions and more. Do you think you can give your opinion and potentially spread awareness over that?
I think it's a little insane to be sent this ask about a petsite that I no longer play and don't intend to play like a politician getting asked for comment. This did intrigue me though, so what the hell, sure. I dug into it a bit. I'll put my findings and opinions below.
Disclaimer that I'm not any sort of petsite authority nor should I be considered one. If I get one more crazy ask accusing me of being a paid shill I'm going to turn off anons permanently.
I. WHO ARE THE DEVELOPERS?
I already talked about it a few months ago here, but Pawborough does not have an in-house web developer team but contracts it out. The Kickstarter (archive) way back in 2022 confirms that they intended to hire a graphics design and a software company as contractors to build the petsite.
When management of the project shifted over to Blue, he hired CKC/CKCollab to contract the project out to. They don't seem to have hired a graphics design company, possibly why the site looks the way it does, and all the development of the site up to Alpha seems to have been done by them (confirmed in a review (archive) left by Blue Mayfield, who is Blue from Pawborough).
Erik, the CEO of CKCollab, is also listed in the site credits as the lead dev.
CKCollab seems to be a small company with 4 employees (Eric, another full stack developer, a graphic designer, and a marketing person.) We may never know why Blue decided to bring on CKCollab (maybe some of these people know each other in real life?) given that their website looks like the landing page of a hackathon with widgets filled with the sort of breathlessly enthusiastic nothing you'd expect from a Claude-generated descriptions in 2026. CKC's list of previous projects include:
a VR skydiving experience
streamlining schedules for cooking classes held online via Zoom
A Git streak tracker that is now defunct
I don't know, maybe this is the type of experience you're really looking for when you want to contract out your petsite's web development. I wouldn't know, because I've never thought of starting a petsite and not having any development staff on hand.
CKCollab's CEO, founder, and main guy is someone named Eric Carmichael. He's ckcollab over on Github. For the last year and a bit, he's been making hundreds of contributions a month to a private repository, which I can only assume is the Pawborough site code.
His last public post was creating an issue in a Godot MCP repository that enables AI coding agents (like Claude and Cline), asking how it's meant to integrate with his own preferred AI coding agent. This is in 2025, by the way.
So much for plausible deniability 'we've denounced this sort of tech-landscape after 2023', huh?
(That was bullshit too, of course. Eric wrote another article in 2025 gushing about how Elon's pet LLM represents 'a development shop working with both cutting-edge tech and local businesses... Grok 3 [is] another step toward making AI practical for everyday use'.)
You could say whatever values this company holds is not the PB team's work values... but Eric's your lead developer, isn't he? Maybe your team IS against generative AI, so you ask him not to consult any chatbots during development or use any of the LLM agents he's eager to integrate into other plugins when he's coding for your site. A bit like putting a fox into a henhouse and sternly telling him under this roof we're strictly vegetarian, isn't it? (Also, Eric seems to have been into crypto, which honestly tracks with everything else.)
Anyway, that's the rundown on the people we know for sure are involved.
Blue contracted Pawborough's development to the small company CKCollab.
CKCollab's owner/founder is Eric Carmichael.
Eric seems to remain the main developer/contributor to Pawborough's codebase.
Eric is and seems to remain staunchly pro-generative AI.
Once again, I have to wonder why CKC was Blue's company of choice for developing a cat roleplay petsite.
II. IS THE SITE ACTUALLY VIBECODED?
I'm going to get this out of the way early. I did some poking around, and the answer is 'probably not, beyond the amount of slop that AI coding agents already provide to experienced developers'.
At the very least, it can't provably be traced back to LLM coding agents. The site is really poorly designed and runs like absolute shit, but I think that's just incredibly bad site design. Eric, the lead dev, almost definitely uses LLM agents to code with, but most js builders strip comments and there's no trace prompts left in the HTML or .js files. There's also no .map to dig through.
I did do due diligence on this! I spent about an hour and a half looking through everything I could expose through devtools on the front end of the site. Like someone else pointed out, the site is slopped together in a way that makes no sense for the kind of site it is and runs almost astoundingly inefficiently, but that's no smoking gun, it's just incredibly bad development. It could be AI/vibecoding, or it could be the developers are not the project founders and have no idea what the vision for the site is supposed to be. It's not anything I can prove without a look at the source, anyway, but I'm a civil engineer and not a software specialist.
^There's some inefficiencies and typos in a lot of the files that make me sure those parts were written by human hands, LOL.
If anyone else wants to go looking, I dug through .js files (exposed via Debugger > Sources > Search) and json from the Network tabs as well as the site HTML, looking for footprints left behind by LLM prompting or repositories. But like I said, most js builders strip out comments.
I want to point out a red herring in case anyone else goes snooping: there's something in there that looks VERY much like a smoking gun for 'this site uses AI'.
It is, however, just part of the Zendesk widget that comes with that bullshit as a dependency (it's the Support popup they have in the bottom left of the page). Pawborough doesn't make any reference to it in the actual site code, it's a nothingburger.
That doesn't mean large parts of the site WEREN'T written with heavy AI assistance. We've established the lead developer is very much into LLM agents and I honestly don't see him not using it to help him with the site development, which leads me to my next bit...
There's a metric fuckton of useless Nuxt files, Eric loves react.js, and the developers previous projects relied a LOT on Vue.js. Like I've pointed out, the majority of their webapp development experience so far is stuff like REAL ESTATE sites, streamlining COOKING services, pharmatech, etc... it's all client stuff, stuff you might build on Wix but could contract out to a software developer to make it easier and prettier.
There's a fuckton of useless Nuxt files because Vuetify is a drag and drop UI thing. This stuff isn't what you use to graphic design and build petsites.
Okay, we're getting into theory time now, and everything beyond this is my opinion.
I think the site looks and runs like vibecoded bullshit that doesn't understand the user experience because the site IS vibecoded bullshit that doesn't understand the user experience, just on the conceptual stage and not the coding side.
Eric is a software developer who's been active since at least 2012. His company mostly goes all in on stuff like developing sites for physical and online retail businesses. This does not in any way qualify him or his team for building petsites. I'm not convinced any of them play petsites, and I'm not convinced Kro or Blue or whoever was in charge of HIRING them was capable of communicating their requirements for the site and what it should do and feel like to this team.
I'm sure there were some major communication frustrations in terms of what the site should be, how it should look like - I mean, this is what we hire graphic designers for, the site design is important - and what it ended up looking like was a corporate, 'dynamic-loading', Squarespace-esque site because that's what CKCollab builds. At some point likelier than not, one of the developers asked a chatbot 'hey, what features and libraries should I use for a petsite?' and the LLM spat out some of the design features of the site that look like insane user choices to the humans who would actually end up playing the game - the social media-like forum system, the baffling interfaces, the individually named and keyed Pelt URLs...
IV. OKAY, SO WHAT'S MY OPINION ON THIS?
I don't play the site. I genuinely don't care if anyone else plays the site. Personally, I don't plan on giving Pawborough a single red cent, but that's because I think it's a frankly insane business move to try and create a petsite with contractors and not a single real software developer on board. (I mean, if the founders aren't doing art and they're not doing coding, what are they doing contracting out the entire rest of the site to everyone else? Project managers?) I answered this ask because it intrigued me how everyone was running around like headless chickens with none of this information actually collected anywhere. I don't actually care about the site.
If me (and everyone else) is wrong, and Pawborough didn't have any AI involved in its development, where do you go from here? Their lead developer, Eric, is and continues to be a staunch AI supporter. It's really likely that anyone who greenlit hiring this guy is, too. It's genuinely hard to miss that CKCollab is strongly pro-generative AI. Any money the site makes still goes to that guy as pay.
You don't have to use LLM chatbots and AI as a developer. It's not inevitable. You don't have to live this way. If you want to say that it's inevitable that companies have to embrace AI coding as performance enhancement to survive in the software industry, please understand that that's not true and pure cope.
I don't care if you don't play Pawborough. I don't care if you do play Pawborough. Don't send me messages about how I'm not giving the developers a fair shake and the site is on the up-and-up. If you find out more about the site's situation or have corrections to make to the info presented here, go ahead and send me that, but I think whether or not you want to keep playing the site is up to everyone's own personal interrogations of themselves.
It's okay if you're too financially and emotionally invested in the site to square it with your own public opinions about AI, you know? It's easy to say 'fuck AI' but hard to stick to those principles when you've got emotional and financial investment in something succeeding. Just do your due diligence and don't lie to yourself.
I'll leave you with how comfortable Eric Carmichael is and continues to be with AI tools, LOL. I think it's simply very stupid to PAY someone to vibecode. It's bad to not understand what you're creating and especially bad when you're contracting out to a person who vibecodes because like. who is going to fix that. not him and certainly not you because neither of you understand what's happening in there.
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