AI Dev Tools: Week 1 - Vibe Coding & Foundations
This first week of the AI Dev Tools Zoomcamp helped me lay the foundations of AI-assisted coding — i.e. adopting tools and workflows that make code writing faster, cleaner, and more efficient. Here are the main takeaways:
Vibe Coding
The course introduced me to the concept of “Vibe Coding” — leveraging AI assistants, coding-assist tools, project bootstrappers, and even automated agents to accelerate development rather than reinvent the wheel.
The Tool Landscape
I discovered a concrete landscape of current tools: * AI-powered code assistants / IDEs: GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code. * Project generators (“bootstrappers”): Bolt or Lovable, which let you rapidly scaffold a new app.
Hands-on: Snake Game
The methodology is hands-on: right away we work on a small project (a Snake game in React + JS), using these AI tools to see their real benefit in a development context.
Key Learnings
A key message from the course: you don’t need prior AI knowledge to begin. If you already know a programming language (Python, JavaScript…), that’s enough to start benefiting from AI assistants.
What struck me: the potential of a modern, AI-integrated dev workflow — combining assistants, agents, automation — to reduce friction, speed up prototyping or production phases, and free mental bandwidth for architecture, business logic, and code quality.
In short — Week 1 helped me shift away from the “hand-code everything” paradigm toward a more fluid, developer-AI collaborative approach that feels well-suited for modern software projects.
Homework: Todo app in Django using AI tools