Acknowledgments

A book of this scope is never the product of a single mind. It emerges from a community of practitioners, researchers, educators, and builders who collectively shaped the field this textbook documents.

The Pioneers

First and foremost, thanks are due to Andrej Karpathy, whose casual but prescient use of the term "vibe coding" in early 2025 gave a name to something millions were already doing. By naming it, he made it visible, discussable, and teachable.

The researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other AI laboratories whose work on large language models made this entire field possible deserve recognition that extends far beyond an acknowledgments page. The transformer architecture, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and the countless engineering innovations that make modern AI coding assistants work represent one of the most remarkable collective achievements in the history of computing.

The Tool Builders

The teams behind the tools discussed extensively in this book—Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Aider, and many others—turned research breakthroughs into practical tools that real people use to build real software every day. Their commitment to developer experience, safety, and continuous improvement has been essential to the growth of vibe coding as a practice.

The Community

The vibe coding community is remarkably open and generous. Developers around the world shared their prompts, their workflows, their failures, and their successes on blogs, Twitter/X, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, and Discord servers. Much of the practical wisdom in this book was first articulated in these informal channels. We are especially grateful to the developers who publicly documented their vibe coding sessions, mistakes and all—these honest accounts were invaluable in understanding real-world patterns.

The Educators

The instructors, course creators, and technical writers who began teaching AI-assisted development before there was a standard curriculum helped establish the pedagogical foundations this book builds upon. Their experiments in teaching vibe coding to audiences ranging from complete beginners to senior engineers informed our approach to progressive skill building.

The Reviewers

Technical reviewers who read draft chapters, tested code examples, attempted exercises, and provided candid feedback improved this book immeasurably. Their diverse perspectives—from professional developers to students to career changers—ensured that the book serves its intended broad audience.

The Open-Source Community

Many of the tools, libraries, and frameworks discussed in this book are open-source projects maintained by dedicated volunteers and contributors. The Python ecosystem in particular—including pytest, Flask, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and hundreds of other packages—provides the foundation on which vibe-coded applications are built. We acknowledge and appreciate every contributor to these projects.

A Personal Note

To every reader who is about to embark on this journey: you are part of a remarkable moment in the history of software development. The skills you will learn in this book will serve you well regardless of how specific tools evolve, because the core skill—clear thinking communicated effectively—is timeless.

Thank you for being part of this.