43.4 Onboarding: teaching new devs the vibe loop

The Challenge

New devs can write code, but vibe coding requires different skills:

• Understanding non-deterministic systems
• Prompt iteration as a skill
• Knowing when AI is wrong vs when you're prompting wrong

Onboarding Curriculum

Week 1: Fundamentals
├─ Day 1: What is vibe coding? (philosophy, not just tools)
├─ Day 2: AI Studio hands-on (no code, just prompting)
├─ Day 3: Our prompt library tour
├─ Day 4: Running evals locally
└─ Day 5: Shadow a prompt review

Week 2: Practice
├─ Day 1-2: Fix a real bug in a prompt (guided)
├─ Day 3-4: Add a feature to existing prompt
└─ Day 5: First solo prompt PR

Week 3: Independence
├─ Write a new prompt end-to-end
├─ Spec → prompt → eval → ship
└─ Handle your first on-call incident

Hands-On Exercises

// Exercise 1: Debug this prompt
// The prompt below works 70% of the time. Make it work 95%+

const brokenPrompt = `Extract the date from this text: {{text}}
Return JSON: {"date": "YYYY-MM-DD"}`;

// Issues to discover:
// - No handling for relative dates ("yesterday")
// - No handling for multiple dates
// - No handling for no date

// Exercise 2: Make this prompt safe
const unsafePrompt = `Answer the user's question: {{question}}`;

// Issues to discover:
// - No system role
// - No scope restrictions
// - No injection protection

Where to go next

• 43.5 Defining quality bars