Vibe Coding 101 for Software Engineers

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." — Andrej Karpathy, February 3, 2025

A 12-week course teaching disciplined AI-assisted development for software engineers. Learn to harness any AI coding tool — Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, Copilot, Bolt.new, and more — while maintaining professional engineering standards.

This course is tool-agnostic. Tools change every 3 months. Disciplines last decades.

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Course Structure

Phase	Weeks	Focus
Foundations	1–4	Learn the tools, ship a prototype
Engineering	5–8	Testing, architecture, security, automation
Launch	9–12	Scale, multi-agent systems, ship publicly

12-Week Curriculum

Week	Title	Subtitle
1	Disciplined Vibe Coding	What Is Vibe Coding?
2	How AI Coding Actually Works	LLMs, Tokens & Context
3	Ship It Week	PRD → Prototype → Deploy
4	Iteration & Code Review	Context Engineering
5	Testing AI-Generated Code	Why AI Code Needs More Testing
6	Architecture & Design Patterns	Guiding AI Toward Good Patterns
7	Security & AI Vulnerabilities	Package Hallucination & Prompt Injection
8	Skills, Agents & Automation	Building Reusable AI Workflows
9	Production Patterns & Scaling	Error Handling, Logging & Monitoring
10	Multi-Agent Systems	Orchestration & MCP
11	Ethics, Governance & Feature Freeze	Ship Responsibly
12	Demo Day & Launch	Present, Ship, Celebrate

Weeks 1–5 are available with lecture notes and slides. Weeks 6–12 are coming soon.

Two Milestones

Milestone	Week	Deliverable
Mid-term Checkpoint	6	Working prototype + architecture docs
Demo Day	12	Launched product + presentation

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Key Concepts

Disciplined Vibe Coding — Harnessing AI speed while maintaining professional standards: testing, architecture, security, and code review.

Context Engineering — The successor to prompt engineering. Organizing all information (not just prompts) so AI can solve problems effectively.

The EPCV Cycle — Explore → Plan → Code → Verify. The universal workflow for AI-assisted development, applicable in any tool.

PRD-First Development — Every project starts with a Product Requirements Document. AI cannot infer from omission.

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Getting Started

Free Tools (Complete the Course for $0)

Tool	Purpose	Link
Gemini CLI	Free-tier AI coding in terminal	aistudio.google.com
VS Code	Code editor	code.visualstudio.com
GitHub	Version control + CI/CD	github.com
Vercel / Render	Free deployment	vercel.com

Student Discounts

Tool	Discount	Link
GitHub Student Pack	100+ free tools	education.github.com/pack
Cursor Pro	1 year free	cursor.com/students

See the full Student Tools Guide for all free and discounted options.

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Repository Structure

├── course-materials/
│   ├── SYLLABUS.md                 # Official 12-week syllabus
│   ├── weeks/
│   │   ├── week-01/                # Disciplined Vibe Coding
│   │   ├── week-02/                # How AI Coding Actually Works
│   │   ├── week-03/                # Ship It Week
│   │   └── week-04/                # Iteration & Code Review
│   ├── templates/
│   │   └── examples/               # 24 PRD examples across all difficulty levels
│   └── resources/
│       └── STUDENT_TOOLS_GUIDE.md  # Free-tier tool breakdown
└── README.md                       # You are here

Each week folder contains:

• README.md — Lecture content with learning objectives and key concepts
• slides/ — Presentation slides (PDF + editable PPTX where available)
• lab-exercise/ — Hands-on activities (where applicable)

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Resources

Official Documentation

• Cursor Documentation
• Claude Code Documentation
• Gemini CLI Documentation
• Windsurf Documentation
• GitHub Copilot Documentation
• MCP Specification

Recommended Reading

• DeepLearning.AI: Agent Skills with Anthropic
• Addy Osmani: My LLM Coding Workflow Going Into 2026
• MIT Technology Review: From Vibe Coding to Context Engineering

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Author

Goker Ezberci

• x.com/gokerez
• linkedin.com/in/gokerezberci

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Version 2.0 — February 2026