The guidebook
A book-length operating system, not a prompt cheat sheet.
Twenty-seven chapters. Front matter to back matter. Diagrams for the parts that do not survive as prose: two spaces, brief anatomy, the two gates, location-carries-status, Day One.
What the parts cover
I — Why pure vibe coding collapses
The two-week wall, how traditional practice still applies, and the missing foundation.
II — The operating system
Two spaces. Investigations versus briefs. The briefing system. Two human gates. Cadence. Rules that come from scars. Standing engineering disciplines.
III — The foundation files
What lives at the root of the repo, path-scoped rules, the docs tree, document types, migrations, tests, and CI.
IV — Ops for operators
Environments, secrets, domains, DNS, databases, deploy, observability, runbooks. The unglamorous layer that keeps a live product alive.
V — Putting it into practice
Day One. Choosing a stack and models. Three starter projects as document packets. Growing your own scar tissue. An existing-repo on-ramp if you are not starting empty.
What this is not
- Not a course in writing code.
- Not a vendor lock to one model or one IDE.
- Not multi-agent hive-mind orchestration for staff engineers.
- Not a promise that the agent can merge to production.