Steve Yegge and Gene Kim, co-authors of Vibe Coding

Atlas · Books

Vibe Coding

Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond. A 2025 book by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge, foreword by Dario Amodei. Published by IT Revolution.

Vibe Coding — book cover
Gold Medal 2026 Axiom Awards · Business Technology Silver 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin · Professional & Technical

By Gene Kim — author of The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook — and Steve Yegge.

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IT Revolution · Oct 2025

About the book

Vibe Coding is a practical book about a new way of building software, where intent and conversational flow matter more than syntax. Developers describe what they want; the system builds it. The book lays out how to harness GenAI at production scale without losing the engineering excellence modern systems demand.

The authors draw on decades of combined experience in software engineering and developer productivity — Gene from the DevOps and Phoenix Project arc, me from Amazon, Google, Grab, and Sourcegraph — to walk through how teams transform programming challenges into fluid conversations with coding agents while still shipping real systems.

The book won the Gold Medal at the 2026 Axiom Book Awards and Silver at the 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards in the Professional & Technical category.

320 pages · paperback, ebook, audiobook · IT Revolution · October 2025

In the press

“IT is a layered activity. We're losing the bottom layer, code generation. Everyone's getting pushed up in that direction because AI is writing code.”
— Steve Yegge in Deloitte Tech Trends 2026, dedicated sidebar “From writer to director”. Read the sidebar →
The author was quoted at length in a March 2026 New York Times Magazine feature on AI coding agents and the future of programming — the most-cited piece on the practitioner side of the AI-coding shift to date.
Read the article →

Talks & podcasts

Pieces of Vibe Coding appear across a year of talks and podcasts. The book is the consolidated text; these are the places where the ideas first showed up in public.

2025-12 Steve Yegge's Vibe Coding Manifesto Latent Space
2025-12 2026: The Year The IDE Died with Gene Kim
2025 Stop Writing Code — That's What LLMs Are For Sourcegraph · CHOP keynote
2025-04 Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge O'Reilly Radar
2025-04 Vibe Coding and the Rise of AI Agents The Data Exchange
2026-02 The AI Vampire with Gas Town's Steve Yegge Hanselminutes #1034
2026-02 Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development SE Daily · Kevin Ball

Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene

A video podcast Gene Kim and I recorded around the book — conversations and live working sessions on building software with coding agents.

S1E1 When and How Vibe Coding Changed Our Lives Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E2 FAAFO! Faster, Ambitious, Autonomous/Alone, Fun, Options Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E3 As Developers, We Move From Line Cook to Head Chef — Very FAAFO! Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E4 Programming Is Hard (No Winners, Only Survivors!), and When Vibe Coding Goes Very Wrong Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E5 Vibe Writing: How We Wrote This Book (The Isomorphic Sibling of Vibe Coding) Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E6 Live Demo of Vibe Writing a New Section: Why Every AI Needs a REPL Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E7 Who Vibe Coding Is For — Developers and So Many More! Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
S1E8 Show and Tell: Efrit — Giving Claude Full Access to 50 Years of Emacs Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
— Pairing Session: Migrating Wyvern Management Scripts with Claude Code with Gene Kim · IT Revolution
— Pairing Session: 2-Hour Pair Programming — Fix Two Tests with Gene Kim · IT Revolution

Workshops

Vibe Coding is also the textbook for a workshop series I run with Gene Kim under IT Revolution. Hands-on, two-day format for engineering leaders, with the Eight Levels of Agentic Adoption framework as the spine.

Steve Yegge and Gene Kim holding copies of Vibe Coding at a book signing
Book signing with Gene Kim
Engineers working at long tables in a glass-walled corporate room during a Vibe Coding workshop
Vibe Coding Workshop
Steve Yegge and Gene Kim seated outdoors on a tree-lined deck during a co-author working session
With Gene Kim

More on the workshop format at IT Revolution, or write a short note to enquire about a workshop for your engineering organisation.