Software Engineering Applied to AI Software Development
Dirt asked me a how to question about my Init-Agent project, I spent an evening and produced a book.
What’s the difference between a Vibe Coder and ANY use of AI to generate code? Is it not all “vibe coding fart apps”. The human knows nothing, tells the AI to build an app, out comes AI slop? Ah yes, the desperate hope of those resisting AI and the trap of those brand new to the tools.
I have found that following the SAME software engineering practices I’ve used for years when using AI tools offers a much higher quality product. It’s not “spray and pray” nor “prompt, run, copy error back in, repeat”.
I have created a methodology for bringing Software Engineering best practices to AI tools like Codex, Claude Code, Antigravity - ANY agentic tool. I received some feedback that illuminated a problem: before someone can understand how to benefit from such a methodology, it helps to start with teaching Software Engineering - only using AI. Already that will be a huge leap for folks in their ability to consistently and quickly create quality apps using AI.
After going through the steps manually, the reason, purpose and utility of the methodology becomes clear.
So I wrote a book that has two parts. Part one teaches Software Engineering using AI. Part 2 teaches how to supercharge this with AgentFlow skills and orchestration.
I walk you through creating a project, a CLI based task manager. Don’t want to do that project? In the Appendix I discuss what your own project would need to have in order to learn all the steps in the book. I find that having a project is the best way to learn any kind of development.
I wrote this book with a modified application of this very process. I created a complete suite of specialized AI agents/skills to handle different aspects of putting a quality book together. Then walked through a workflow that’s almost identical to coding. A second book is in progress that will go into that process in more detail.
AI Slop? You be the judge. I would have loved to have this book three years ago.
https://github.com/leebase/ai-coding-book.git