The opinionated, AI-friendly stack and learning path for people who build with AI.
📖 Read it online: https://vibecoders.ismail9k.com/
You're shipping real things with an AI assistant. But there's a whole layer of tooling a real project needs that nobody told you about — the reason you ask the AI to "make my code neat" instead of installing a formatter, because you didn't know formatters exist. This guide closes that gap.
People building software with AI who don't know what they don't know. You can describe what you want and get working code, but you're unsure which tools to use, what's missing from your setup, or what to learn next. No computer-science degree assumed.
- New to this? Start with the Learning Path — a leveled, ordered route from fundamentals to shipping.
- Know what you're building? Jump straight to your domain: Web, Mobile, Backend, or AI Apps.
- Everyone, regardless: read the Universal Toolbelt. It's the tools every project needs and the ones beginners most often miss.
- Stuck on a word? The Glossary defines every bit of jargon in plain language.
This guide gives you one default pick per job, not a menu. The picks follow three rules, in order:
- AI-friendly — popular, well-documented tools that AI assistants handle well. Your speed depends on how well the AI knows the tool.
- Beginner-friendly — gentle learning curve, great docs, big community.
- Free tier — ship without a credit card.
And one rule above all three: buy or glue, don't build. Almost everything your project needs — auth, payments, image hosting, email, an affiliate program, scaling — is a solved problem that someone hosts better than you will. Use it. Build it yourself only when you've actually hit a wall the service can't clear, not before. Your time is the scarce resource; spend it on the one thing that's actually your idea. See Buy, Don't Build for the job-by-job picks.
One language end to end — TypeScript — so the same knowledge carries across web, mobile, backend, and AI. The bias is ship fast and learn, not enterprise scale. When something is overkill for a beginner, we say so in a "Don't bother yet" list rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
- Universal Toolbelt — the tools every project needs (read this first)
- Buy, Don't Build — the jobs to outsource instead of building yourself
- Web — the default web stack
- Mobile — the default mobile stack
- Backend — the default backend / API stack
- AI Apps — the default LLM-app stack
- Skills & Plugins — extending your AI assistant 🚧 (todo)
- Learning Path — what to learn, in what order
- Glossary — plain-language definitions