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Day 4: Systems Design & Project Management
You can build features. Day 4 teaches you to build systems — the project management and design thinking that keeps a vibe-coded project coherent as it grows.
A single feature is easy. A product is hard. Not because any individual piece is complicated, but because the pieces have to fit together, and when the code is written by natural language, the person describing the features is the only one who can see the whole picture. The agent sees one prompt at a time. You have to be the one who makes sure prompt seven does not undo what prompt three built, and that prompt twelve fits into the architecture you established in prompt one.
This day is about project management, not in the Gantt-chart-and-status-meetings sense, but in the practical sense of keeping a growing codebase under control. It covers the four skills that determine whether a vibe-coded project survives past the second week: decomposing a product vision into a sequence of prompts the agent can execute reliably, managing version control when the commits are AI-authored, setting up automated testing and deployment so the agent's output gets verified before it reaches users, and the git workflow that gives you a safety net under every change.
By the end of today, you will have a project management system for vibe coding — a way to start with a product idea and end with a working, deployed application, where every step along the way is a prompt the agent can handle.
What you will cover
- Breaking Work Into Bite-Sized Pieces — an agent can build a feature. It cannot build a product in one prompt. Learn to decompose a product vision into a sequence of prompts, each one building on the last. Task decomposition, dependency ordering, estimating what an agent can handle in one session. Real example: decomposing "build a SaaS dashboard" into 15 prompts, in order.
- Git Workflows for Vibe Coding — when the agent writes the commits, you need a workflow that keeps things organized. Branch per feature. Commit messages that tell you what the agent was asked to build. Reviewing AI-authored diffs. Rolling back when the agent goes off track. This is not a git tutorial — it is the specific git workflow for vibe-coded projects.
- CI/CD for Vibe-Coded Applications — automate testing and deployment so the agent's output gets verified before it reaches users. GitHub Actions that run tests, lint, and check for security issues. Auto-deploy on merge. The pipeline that turns "describe a feature" into "feature is live" without manual steps. Real workflow example.
These three lessons, combined with the four patterns from Day 3, form a complete development methodology. You start with a spec, you decompose it into prompts the agent can execute, you version every change through git, and you automate verification and deployment through CI/CD. Every step is a tool you control. The agent does the implementation. You do the project management.