Beyond Vibe Coding
Welcome! Hello! This is Beyond Vibe Coding, and I am so excited about this course, because it's for a group of people I've wanted to teach for years: people who aren't developers and don't particularly want to become developers — but who want to build real things anyway, and build them well.
Here's the deal. AI can write code now — you've probably heard, possibly at every meeting you've attended since 2023. What the hype leaves out is that there's an enormous difference between generating code and shipping something you understand, can fix, and can grow. That difference is this course. You will not become a professional typist-of-code here. You will become something arguably more useful in this new era: a capable reader of code, a sharp director of the AI that writes it, and a person who can take an idea from blank page to a real, live URL — with a database, user accounts, and your name on the repo — and actually understand what you built. By the end, you'll have shipped several apps and one capstone project that is entirely yours.
We start in the friendliest possible place with my co-instructor Brandon and the fine folks at Replit, and then I'll take the wheel: we'll set up a professional-grade toolchain with VS Code and GitHub Copilot, learn to read the languages of the web, and then go deep — servers, databases, auth, deployment, debugging — the whole path to shipping. Everything at reading depth, everything in service of building.
Who is this course for?
You! No coding experience is required — genuinely none, this course assumes nothing. If you're a PM, a designer, a marketer, an analyst, an accountant, a lawyer, a founder, or just a person with an idea and a healthy suspicion that "the AI will handle it" isn't the whole story, this course was built for you. And if you do have some coding experience, you'll still get a lot here — the back half of the course is about working with AI agents the way the best builders do right now, and that's new territory for almost everyone.
All you need is a computer, curiosity, and a healthy tolerance for my jokes.
Who am I?
My name is Brian Holt, and I'm a principal technical program manager at Microsoft, working on dev tools and AI for Postgres. Which is a fancy way of saying: my literal day job is making databases and developer tools work well with AI — the exact intersection this course lives at. Before Microsoft (this is my second tour there, actually) I worked at Databricks, Neon, Snowflake, Stripe, LinkedIn, Netflix, Reddit, and some other startups, doing everything from staff engineering to dev rel to VP of product. I've been shipping AI dev tools for the past several years, and I've been teaching people to code online for over a decade — this is somewhere north of my thirtieth course.
When I'm not working or teaching, you'll find me hanging out with my amazing wife and our two kids in Seattle, where we recently moved back after a stint in Sacramento. I enjoy snowboarding, golf, hazy IPAs, Islay Scotches, Magic: The Gathering, and being a minority investor in a Serie A football club Cagliari Calcio, which is a long story I will happily tell you if you ever buy me one of the aforementioned IPAs. I also have an adorable and now rather grumpy Havanese named Luna, who you may hear snoring in some of the recordings.
Please catch up with me on social media! Be aware that I'm awful at responding to DMs!!
Where to file issues
I write these courses with a lot of care, but across this many hours of material, mistakes are inevitable — in the grammar, in the code, occasionally in my opinions (rarely — ask anyone). If you find one, the best thing you can do is open an issue or a pull request on this course's GitHub repo: that way it gets fixed, and everyone who comes after you gets a better course and can Google the same answer you got. I'm always happy to chat on social media, but I can't be tech support for everyone — GitHub is the way. (And conveniently, filing a good issue is literally a skill this course teaches, so consider it extra credit.)
Special thanks
This course exists thanks to the wonderful people at Master.dev and at Replit. The Master.dev team (many of you may know them from their years as Frontend Masters) are family to me — they've spent well over a decade making tech education genuinely excellent and genuinely approachable, and I'm proud this course lives with them. And thanks to Replit and Brandon for kicking this whole journey off the right way: with you building something on day one.
One last request: please star the course repo on GitHub. It helps the course be more discoverable, and it helps my fragile ego.
Let's go build something.
