From vibe-coded prototype to professional product.
A collection of patterns for building production software with AI coding agents. Each chapter captures hard-won lessons from shipping a real product this way — the kind of knowledge that's easy to develop and easy to forget.
Primary audience: Future-me, starting a new product. Hand these chapters to Claude (or your AI coding agent of choice) at project start and skip the rediscovery phase.
Secondary audience: Builders who have a working prototype — built with Bolt, Lovable, Cursor, or pure vibe coding — and want to turn it into something professional. You don't need "how to prompt an AI." You need "how to run a software operation where AI does most of the coding."
With an AI coding agent: Add the relevant chapters to your project context. They're written to work as bootstrap documents — enough context that your agent knows the patterns, pitfalls, and workflows without you re-explaining everything.
As a human reader: Read the foundation chapters in order if you're starting fresh, or jump to the stage chapter that matches where you are.
These build on each other. Start here.
| # | Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Getting Started | Ground-clearing decisions and the six foundations contract |
| 2 | Guardrails | Prevent disasters from humans and LLMs — environment pipeline, database controls, secret hygiene |
| 3 | Code Quality | Why traditional review fails for AI-generated code, and what to do instead |
These are independent. Reach for them when the need arises.
| Chapter | When you need it |
|---|---|
| Token Economics | Your AI costs are rising or your context window feels cramped |
| API Tokens & Secrets | You have your first API key and nowhere safe to put it |
| Multiplying Throughput | Your single-agent workflow is a bottleneck |
| Running a Team of Agents | You need specialized roles, not just more hands |
| Security Fundamentals | You have users and something worth protecting — layers, attack trees, tooling |
| Security in the Mythos Era | You depend on open-source packages and probability of detection = 1 |
| Security Operations | You need ongoing security practice, not just initial setup |
| Support Operations | You're the entire support team |
| Finance Operations | You have revenue and need to track costs |
Stage chapters are added as patterns are captured. Not all are written yet.