Vibe Coding: AI-Assisted Software Development for Professional Engineers
Frame software problems into problem statements, constraints, and non-goals before prompting any AI assistant
Vibe Coding: AI-Assisted Software Development for Professional Engineers teaches AI-assisted engineering with professional controls.
You will LEARN to frame problems before prompting, give AI the right context, and verify output; BUILD small, reviewable changes with tests and security review; and GROW the judgement to know when not to trust AI.
This is not “prompt tricks,” not “build without coding,” and not a ChatGPT tip list. Free Africoders discovery may warm you up; this Premium BUILD track is structured practice with assessment and a portfolio-grade AI-Assisted Builder Operations Service capstone — graded on engineering outcomes and human evidence, not how much AI you used.
Paced for up to 3 months part-time with human instructors and a private course forum.
Positioning
LEARN → BUILD → GROW. AI accelerates implementation; engineers remain responsible.
Tool freshness
Stable competencies are vendor-agnostic. Model names and IDE UIs belong in dated tool notes — not graded MUST criteria.
Further reading
- Git documentation
- GitHub: About pull request reviews
- OWASP Top Ten
- OWASP AI Security and Privacy Guide
- OWASP AI Security project hub
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework
- MDN Web Security
- Laravel 13 Testing
- Testing Library guiding principles
- Semantic Versioning
- Laravel 13 documentation
- React Learn (for frontend-shaped slices)
What you will learn
- Frame software problems into problem statements, constraints, and non-goals before prompting any AI assistant
- Produce specifications and acceptance criteria that constrain AI-assisted implementation
- Assemble relevant repository context (files, contracts, conventions) without dumping secrets or noise
- Use AI to implement small, maintainable, reversible changes that follow project conventions
- Critically review AI-generated code for correctness, architecture fit, and hidden assumptions — including rejecting bad output
- Verify AI-assisted work with appropriate automated tests and refuse untested merges
Prerequisites
- Software Engineering Foundations (Premium) or equivalent: Git, reading diffs, basic tests, and writing small programs
- Comfort using a code editor/IDE and a terminal
- Ability to run a local project with guidance (PHP/Laravel or JS/React stacks are both acceptable for practice)
- Willingness to review code critically — AI drafts are starting points, not finished work
- Prior expert software engineering experience is not required
Skills you’ll develop
Course completion demonstrates these skills. Verification requires assessment or reviewed challenge work.
What you will build and prove
- Practice: Practice: What AI-assisted development changes (and what it does not)
- Project: Vibe Coding Capstone: AI-Assisted Builder Operations Service
- Final assessment: Vibe Coding checkpoint quiz (pass 70%)
Course journey
How this free course is structured — watch, practise, and progress module by module.
- The New Engineering Workflow
- Problem Framing Before Prompting
- Prompting as Engineering Communication
- Giving AI the Right Context
- AI-Assisted Implementation
- Reviewing AI-Generated Code
- Testing AI Output
- Debugging With AI
- Security and Trust
- Git, Collaboration and AI Audit Trails
- From AI-Assisted Build to Production
- Professional Vibe Coding Capstone
Curriculum
Week 1: The New Engineering Workflow
- What AI-assisted development changes (and what it does not) Preview 28min
- Hallucination, confident wrongness, and the verification mindset 30min
- Human responsibility when AI accelerates implementation 28min
Week 2: Problem Framing Before Prompting
- Requirements, constraints, and non-goals under AI acceleration 30min
- Acceptance criteria and edge cases that constrain AI output 32min
- Why bad specifications produce bad AI output 28min
Week 3: Prompting as Engineering Communication
- Structured prompts: task, context, constraints, expected output 30min
- Iterative prompting, decomposition, and exposing assumptions 30min
- Avoiding gimmicky “magic prompts” 28min
Week 4: Giving AI the Right Context
- Repository context: files, contracts, conventions, tests 32min
- Architecture and API/schema context without dumping secrets 30min
- Context drift vs “more text” 28min
Week 5: AI-Assisted Implementation
- Small, reviewable, reversible changes 30min
- Feature slices, boilerplate, and explaining existing code 28min
- Avoiding giant generated rewrites 28min
Week 6: Reviewing AI-Generated Code
- Correctness, contracts, and “looks right” vs “is right” 32min
- Maintainability, hidden assumptions, and over-engineering 30min
- Practicing rejection: finding and refusing bad AI output 34min
Week 7: Testing AI Output
- Tests as verification — not rubber stamps 30min
- Unit, integration, boundary, and negative cases for AI-touched code 32min
- Reviewing AI-generated tests (and why they can lie) 30min
Week 8: Debugging With AI
- The professional debugging loop (observe→reproduce→isolate→hypothesis→evidence→verify) 32min
- Asking AI targeted questions without outsourcing diagnosis 30min
- When AI proposes the WRONG diagnosis — catching and documenting it 34min
Week 9: Security and Trust
- Secrets, private repos, and prompt/context leakage 32min
- Insecure AI defaults: injection, XSS, authz mistakes 34min
- Security review checklist for AI-assisted changes 30min
Week 10: Git, Collaboration and AI Audit Trails
- Small commits and meaningful messages for AI-assisted work 28min
- Human code review remains the gate 30min
- Building an AI audit trail: accept, reject, correct, verify 34min
Week 11: From AI-Assisted Build to Production
- Locally functional ≠ production-ready 30min
- Config, migrations, logs, rollback, and verification 32min
- Operational ownership after AI-assisted ship 28min
Week 12: Professional Vibe Coding Capstone
- Capstone brief: AI-Assisted Builder Operations Service 30min
- Planning, AI usage policy, and verification strategy 32min
- Demo, readiness checklist, and retrospective 30min
Free to enroll — no purchase required.
Instructor: Africoders
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