SIGCSE Virtual 2026
Teaching Vibecoding: An Open Curriculum for AI-Assisted Software Development
Andy Luu, Eli Young, Michael Wehar
2nd ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference, November 12-15, 2026
Abstract
Vibecoding, building software by stating intent to an AI in natural language instead of hand-coding it, is spreading quickly through industry and entrepreneurship. In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of developers reported using or planning to use AI coding tools, and Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, disclosed in early 2025 that a quarter of its most recent startup batch participants had codebases that were roughly 95% AI-generated. As the workforce moves in this direction, graduates need skills that conventional curricula, still built around writing code by hand, seldom teach directly, such as writing precise specifications, supervising AI coding agents, and verifying code that looks plausible but may be wrong or insecure. In a 2024 Cengage survey, 70% of recent graduates said training in generative AI should be integrated into coursework. We present Vibecoding: Introduction to Applied AI, an openly licensed curriculum, released early and still under active development. It comprises a textbook, lecture slides, a syllabus, and a hands-on lab for every chapter. The coursework runs from specification writing through building full-stack applications to critically evaluating AI-generated output. It is sequenced in this way so that students build competence with AI tools before confronting the shortcomings and limitations of such tools. We describe the curriculum's design and rationale while outlining our plan to pilot and evaluate it in the classroom.
- computing education
- AI-assisted programming
- curriculum design
- vibecoding
- prompt engineering
The curriculum
The course this paper describes is free to read and use right now, for classroom and personal use under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Open the textbookCite this paper
Andy Luu, Eli Young, and Michael Wehar. 2026. Teaching Vibecoding: An Open Curriculum for AI-Assisted Software Development. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V.2 (SIGCSE Virtual 2026), November 12-15, 2026, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3795860.3846244
@inproceedings{luu2026teaching,
author = {Luu, Andy and Young, Eli and Wehar, Michael},
title = {Teaching Vibecoding: An Open Curriculum for AI-Assisted Software Development},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V.2},
series = {SIGCSE Virtual 2026},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
doi = {10.1145/3795860.3846244}
}