Beyond Vibe Coding: A practical guide to AI-assisted development (beyond.addy.ie)

Google engineering leader Addy Osmani lays out a practical playbook for moving beyond “vibe coding” — the high-level, copy-paste style of AI-assisted prototyping — toward disciplined, production-ready AI-assisted engineering. He frames AI-assisted work as a spectrum (autocomplete → chatbots → autonomous agents) and warns of the “70% problem”: models can rapidly get you most of the way, but the last 30% exposes maintainability, security, and correctness gaps. The guide stresses why this matters: as AI democratizes development, teams must balance speed with trust, control, and engineering rigor to avoid hidden costs, regressions, and leaked credentials. The piece is rich in actionable guidance: always plan first (SPEC.md/mini-PRD), supply rich context (code files, logs, schemas, screenshots, Figma imports), and adopt Plan/Enhance modes to iterate designs before generating code. It prescribes ruthless incremental testing (localhost, console checks), explicit debugging prompts, and using personas (senior dev, security auditor) for focused outputs. Osmani also introduces a two-dimensional framework (people’s proficiency vs AI abstraction) and the three pillars of trust (familiarity, reliability, control), plus prompt-engineering patterns (few-shot examples, stepwise chains-of-thought) to get deterministic, production-grade results. The guide is a pragmatic roadmap for teams who want AI to augment—not replace—sound software engineering.