From Vibe Coder to AI Engineer: The Complete Roadmap
The complete AI engineer roadmap for vibe coders, from my talk at the AI Practitioner Summit 2026. 🎁 Get my free RAMP Framework course (the QR code from this talk) in my free community: https://www.skool.com/leonvanzyl 🚀 Agentic Labs — exclusive AI coding courses, live Q&As, workshops & deep dives: https://skool.com/agentic-labs Vibe coding works for toy apps, but once real users trust your app with their data, you are accountable for everything your agent ships. This is my session from the AI Practitioner Summit 2026: the roadmap from vibe coder to AI engineer. You won't need to write the code yourself, but you will learn to understand your stack and keep your app secure. I use Claude Code and Codex, but the workflow fits any coding agent. We start with the fundamentals and work up to a software factory where 10 coding agents pick up work and open pull requests while you sleep. Stick around for the end, where you'll see that factory running inside a 3D office. Resources Mentioned 🧩 My skills repo (start-an-app + review-an-app): https://github.com/leonvanzyl/skills 🏢 CubeFarm (open source, run npx cubefarm): https://github.com/leonvanzyl/cubefarm ▶️ Watch next: Harness Engineering: Make Any Coding Agent 10x Better https://youtu.be/z1EaBe9oIME Tools I Use 🚀 Wisprflow (speech to text): https://wisprflow.ai/r?LEON114 ⏱️ Chapters 0:00 AI Engineer Roadmap 5:35 Learn Any Codebase With AI 9:42 Agent Skills and AGENTS.md 16:17 GitHub Issues Workflow 20:14 Claude Code Worktrees 22:04 CI CD Pipeline for Agents 29:29 Software Factory and Agent Swarms 32:06 Harness Engineering 34:59 CubeFarm 3D Coding Harness Connect X: https://x.com/leonvz TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@leonvanzylofficial Business & sponsorships: leon@cognaitiv.ai
