The Vibe Engineer

One tweet in February 2025 gave a name to something developers were already doing: describing what they wanted in plain English and letting AI write the code. It's called vibe coding. It's real, it's spreading fast, and almost nobody is teaching how to do it without quietly wrecking your codebase.

That's the gap this book closes. Not a tutorial for one specific tool that'll be obsolete in a year - a real, working playbook for the two jobs every developer now juggles: directing AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot to build software faster, and building your own products with real AI capability inside them, from prompting to retrieval to agents.

Here's what nobody tells you upfront: peer-reviewed research found developers using AI coding assistants shipped measurably less secure code - while feeling more confident it was safe. Real, documented incidents of vibe-coded apps leaking API keys aren't bad luck, they're the predictable result. This book shows you exactly how to get the genuine speed these tools offer without paying that price: the workflow that keeps you in control, the prompting discipline that actually works, the review habits that catch what confidence hides, and the production discipline that separates a fast demo from software real people can depend on.

Then it flips to the other half of the job: building AI-powered features into your own product. Grounding a model in your real data with retrieval. Getting reliable structured output instead of parsing prose. Knowing when an agent is the right call and when it's expensive overkill. Shipping it, evaluating it honestly, and keeping the cost from quietly eating your margins.

No hype. No invented case studies. Every tool, paper, and incident in this book is real, named, and sourced - because a book about building real software shouldn't be built on anything less. If you're already using these tools and want to use them well, this is the book that gets you there.