The Vibe Engineering Manifesto

Reimagining Software Organizations in the AI Era

We stand at the precipice of a fundamental transformation in software development. AI coding agents have evolved from curiosities to co-developers, and organizations that simply view them as productivity tools are missing the revolution.

Vibe Engineering is not just another methodology—it's a complete reimagining of how software teams operate in the AI era.

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From Individual Practice to Organizational Transformation

The term "vibe coding" emerged in early 2024 when Andrej Karpathy described a new approach to programming: "where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." This individual practice of letting AI generate code with minimal human oversight has gained significant attention.

But what happens when we extend this concept beyond individual developers to entire engineering organizations?

While "vibe coding" focuses on individual developers leveraging AI to generate code, Vibe Engineering elevates this concept to the organizational level, transforming:

• How teams are structured

• How architectural decisions are made

• How knowledge is captured and maintained

• How implementation work is distributed

The distinction is critical. Vibe coding makes developers faster. Vibe Engineering makes entire organizations exponentially more capable.

Core Principles

1. AI as a First-Class Team Member—not just an assistant, but a collaborator with defined responsibilities and capabilities

2. Verification-Driven Development—systematically ensuring quality through testing guardrails and automated feedback loops

3. Structured Workflows—architectural patterns that maximize AI capabilities while mitigating limitations

4. Relentless Knowledge Capture—ensuring context is preserved across AI interactions through persistent memory systems

5. Human Strategic Direction—focusing human expertise on architecture and critical decision points

The Rapidly Accelerating Tooling Landscape

The pace of innovation in AI coding tools is staggering. Just 18 months ago, we had GitHub Copilot offering simple completions in VS Code. Today, we have fully autonomous agents that can design, implement, and test entire features with minimal human guidance.

Commercial Leaders

• Cursor has emerged as a leading integration of AI into the development environment, transforming from an editor with AI assistance to a full-fledged platform with autonomous Agent Mode capabilities. Its ability to understand project context and execute multi-file changes has set new standards for productivity.

• GitHub Copilot continues to evolve beyond inline suggestions to more comprehensive assistance, with GitHub Copilot Enterprise now incorporating repository-wide context and understanding.

• Windsurf Built on VSCode like Cursor, but with more bundled features including memory systems, deep contextual awareness, and unified agent-copilot workflows designed to maintain developer flow state.

• Gemini Code Assist & Firebase Studio brings Google's AI capabilities directly into the development workflow, with a focus on enterprise-grade reliability and scale.

Open Source Revolution

The open source community is rapidly closing the gap with commercial tools:

• Cline pioneered the autonomous coding agent approach with its dual-phase Plan and Act modes, allowing AI to first design a solution strategy before implementing it.

• Roo Code (a fork of Cline) extended this with multi-persona modes, fine-grained contextual understanding, and diff-based editing that improves safety and precision.

• KiloCode (forked from Roo) further streamlined the experience by eliminating API key requirements and focusing on usability and rapid iteration.

These open frameworks are driving innovation at a breathtaking pace. Features that once distinguished commercial tools—like autonomous execution, web browsing for research, and contextual understanding of large codebases—are now available in free, open-source alternatives.

AI App Builders

A new category of tools is emerging that takes AI-assisted development even further—autonomous app builders that can generate entire applications from high-level descriptions:

• v0 (by Vercel) transforms natural language descriptions into complete React/Next.js applications with its chat-driven interface and visual preview capabilities.

• Lovable positions itself as a "superhuman full-stack product engineer" that can build entire web applications from a description, featuring real-time collaboration and one-click deployment.

• Replit combines the power of an AI coding assistant with a full cloud development environment where the AI can generate projects, implement features, and verify code execution.

• Bolt.new leverages AI to generate full-stack web applications from natural language prompts with a focus on clean code generation and immediate visual feedback.

These tools are redefining the boundaries between development and no-code platforms, enabling unprecedented speed in going from concept to working application while still producing maintainable code.

Why Now

The convergence of three forces makes this transformation inevitable:

1. Capability Threshold: Modern AI agents now understand entire codebases, reason about architecture, and implement complex features across multiple files. Tools like Cursor, Cline, Roo, and v0 demonstrate multi-step reasoning and project-wide changes.

2. Economic Reality: Engineering costs continue to rise while AI capabilities increase at dramatically lower costs. Organizations that don't adapt will face unsustainable economics.

3. Competitive Advantage: Organizations integrating AI beyond simple code completion are shipping features significantly faster with smaller teams. We've observed this in our own development cycles and in conversations with teams adopting similar approaches.

Architectural Patterns: The Building Blocks of Vibe Engineering

We've identified recurring challenges when integrating AI in software development and developed architectural patterns that address the fundamental limitations of current AI systems.

Memory and Context Management

The most immediate challenge with AI coding assistants is "session amnesia"—they forget everything between conversations and have limited context windows.

Memory Bank Pattern

We've implemented structured knowledge repositories like Cline's Memory Bank system, organizing project context in markdown files that AI agents reload at the start of each session.

See below for an example of how Cline’s Memory bank works:

memory-bank/
├── projectbrief.md # Core goals, requirements, constraints
├── techContext.md # Tech stack, libraries, architecture
├── systemPatterns.md # Design patterns, coding standards
├── activeContext.md # Current work focus, recent changes
└── progress.md # Completed tasks, next steps, issues

This approach dramatically improves context retention between sessions and provides a foundation for team-wide knowledge sharing.

Project Rules Files

We've standardized on persistent instruction files (`.cursor/rules/`, `.windsurfrules`) that have improved our coding consistency and architectural alignment. These project-wide instruction files ensure AI assistants follow team conventions and standards.

Workflow Optimization

Plan-and-Act Pattern

By enforcing a two-phase approach—planning before implementation with human approval in between—we've reduced architectural missteps and rework. This pattern ensures the AI first gathers all necessary information and creates a coherent plan before writing any code.

Verification-First Development

We now prioritize test generation before implementation, which has reduced bugs reaching production. By establishing verification criteria first, we create guardrails that enable AI to generate code with confidence.

Team Structure Evolution

As we've adopted these patterns, we've evolved our team structure:

1. Augmented Developer Model: 1:1 pairing of developers with AI agents

2. Pod Structure: Small human teams orchestrating specialized AI agents

3. Architect-Operator Model: Human architects defining systems while AI teams handle implementation

We're currently transitioning toward the third model, realizing human expertise is best focused on architecture and critical decisions rather than implementation details.

Scaling to Large Engineering Organizations

The patterns above work well for individual developers, but large engineering teams face additional challenges:

Multi-Team Coordination

In large organizations with multiple teams working in parallel, standard memory systems can fragment or conflict. We're developing enhanced approaches:

1. Federated Memory Architecture: Each team maintains a local memory bank linked to a central knowledge repository, with defined synchronization protocols

2. Context Namespacing: Memory structures with explicit team, feature, and branch contexts to prevent conflicts

3. Progressive Knowledge Merging: Policies for resolving conflicts when knowledge from different branches is merged

Branch-Aware Development

For teams working across multiple branches simultaneously:

1. Branch Context Awareness: Memory systems that track branch-specific context and implementation details

2. Differential Knowledge Updates: When switching branches, AI agents update only the delta in context rather than reloading everything

3. Cross-Branch Continuity: Shared architectural understanding that persists across branches, with branch-specific details layered on top

Integration with Existing Workflows

Large organizations have established workflows that must be preserved:

1. CI/CD Integration: Memory bank and project rules versioned alongside code in the CI/CD pipeline

2. Review System Connection: AI agents participating in code reviews with branch-specific context

3. Knowledge Diffusion Protocols: Systematic ways for insights from one team to propagate to others

Governance at Scale

As AI usage expands across teams, governance becomes critical:

1. Centralized Pattern Libraries: Organization-wide collections of successful interaction patterns

2. Agent Configuration Management: Standardized configurations for AI tools across teams

3. Quality Monitoring Systems: Metrics and feedback loops that track AI contribution quality

4. Cross-Team Learning: Structures for sharing AI insights between different project teams

Why are We Talking About This?

At SourceMedium, our team has been using AI coding assistants as primary development tools across our entire stack. We've worked with languages including Elixir, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Swift, and SQL, all augmented by tools like Cursor and Cline.

We're not experts claiming to have all the answers—we're fellow explorers navigating this frontier. We've made plenty of mistakes, had some breakthroughs, and learned lessons that we believe could help others.

What sets our approach apart is that we've rebuilt our entire workflow around these tools, not just added them as a supplemental layer. We continuously iterate on our patterns based on real-world results.

Our Practical Resources

We're open-sourcing our entire Vibe Engineering toolkit – be slowly releasing them on our GitHub profile and in this blog in the coming months.

1. Memory Bank Templates: Our complete folder structure with documentation templates for different project types.

2. Cursor Rules Configuration: The exact configuration we use to align our AI agents with our architecture, including prompt templates for plan/act modes.

3. Verification Framework: Test structures and templates that guide AI implementation effectively, including pre-implementation test generation patterns.

4. Workflow Playbooks: Step-by-step guides for different development scenarios:

• Feature implementation workflow

• Bug fixing protocol

• Refactoring approach

• Code review process

5. Prompt Engineering Library: Our catalog of effective prompts for different tasks, categorized and annotated with success patterns.

6. Team Structure Blueprints: Organizational models for different team sizes and project types, with role definitions and handoff procedures.

7. Enterprise Scaling Guide: Detailed approaches for implementing these patterns across large engineering organizations with multiple teams, branches, and systems.

Getting Started with Vibe Engineering

1. Start with Memory and Context: Implement a basic Memory Bank for a single project to solve the context amnesia problem.

2. Add Structure to AI Interactions: Adopt the Plan-and-Act workflow for new features, forcing the AI to plan before implementing.

3. Introduce Verification Steps: Generate tests alongside or before implementation to create safety guardrails.

4. Standardize AI Environment: Create consistent configurations across your team to ensure predictable AI behavior.

5. Monitor and Measure: Track improvements in velocity, quality, and team experience to validate the approach.

6. Scale Incrementally: Expand successful patterns from individuals to teams, and from teams to the broader organization.

Join Our Community

This manifesto represents the beginning of our journey to share what we've learned. We want to build a community of practitioners figuring out this new frontier together.

The Future of Software Engineering

The question isn't whether software development will be transformed by AI—it's whether your organization will lead that transformation or be left behind by those who do.

The companies that thrive won't just have AI-assisted developers—they'll have reimagined their entire engineering approach around human-AI collaboration, from individual contributors to enterprise-scale teams.