Vibe Engineering: Best Practices, Mistakes, and Tradeoffs (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781633434363)

Get the eBook free when you register your print book at Manning.

Generating code with AI can feel effortless, but it's only one part of software engineering. A production-grade development pipeline includes testing, validation, refactoring, optimization, and deployment. This book shows you how to go from AI-assisted coding to a AI-infused full-spectrum process author Tomasz Lelek and Artur Skowronski call vibe engineering.

Even when AI-generated applications seem to "just work," they're often hiding technical debt, lack of control, unverifiable logic, and other slow-burn bugs that can rot your codebase and hinder productivity. Vibe engineering introduces checks and guardrails tuned to identify and address the most common AI coding issues, from specification through production. Vibe engineering also shows you how LLMs, agents, and other AI-powered tools can help you test, improve, and deploy your applications more efficiently.

In Vibe Engineering: Best practices, mistakes, and tradeoffs you'll learn:

- A mental model for vibe engineering
- Agentic coding best practices
- Accelerating the modernization of legacy applications
- AI-assisted evaluation, validation, and refactoring
- How AI can be used in team setup and cross-functional work

About the book

Vibe Engineering lays out a provider-agnostic framework that's focused on small, easily comprehensible code increments. Fully illustrated with real-world scenarios, it explores industry use cases, from modernizing a legacy codebase to implementing Continuous AI Development. You'll learn how to keep the benefits of speed and efficiency AI-assisted coding can deliver without sacrificing accuracy, maintainability, or trust.

About the reader

For software engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers.

About the author

Tomasz Lelek is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Dremio and co-author of the bestselling Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs. A creator, researcher, and engineer at heart, Tomasz combines deep technical expertise with a passion for clarity and innovation. His work spans distributed systems, data engineering, and AI, with a strong foundation in databases built through extensive work on the Apache Cassandra ecosystem.

Artur Skowronski is Head of Application Development at VirtusLab, a software consulting company responsible for implementing platform-level developer tooling--custom-tailored for multi-million-line codebases and complex monorepos--and the current steward of the Scala programming language. With over a decade of experience as a software engineer, tech lead, solution architect, and technical product manager, he blends hands-on depth with strong product sense and currently leads projects at the intersection of AI and modern software engineering.

Author: Tomasz Lelek,Artur Skowronski
ISBN-10: 1633434362
ISBN-13: 9781633434363
Publisher: Manning Publications
Language: English
Published: 10/27/2026
Pages: 275
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.72lbs