Lately I’ve been thinking about the concept of vibe recipes or vibe cookbooks, if you will.

Today, people are vibe coding. They have an idea, they fire up their preferred coding agent, and they start giving instructions and building the application they want to build.

This process can take one day, two days, three days, or even a week of vibe coding before you end up with the result you’re looking for.

But during that time, you’ll encounter problems with the AI model. You’ll get incorrect results. You may have to repeat yourself. The AI might introduce bugs, introduce security vulnerabilities, misunderstand the business logic you’re trying to implement, or mess up the workflow entirely.

Over the course of that week, however, you eventually fix all of these issues. You refine the prompts, correct mistakes, add missing context, and guide the model toward the desired outcome.

Eventually, you end up with a product you’re happy with - something that actually works, has testing enabled, performs well, contains no obvious security issues, and properly implements the business logic you intended.

Capturing What Was Learned

What if you could consolidate everything you learned during that development process into a kind of recipe?

At its simplest, it could just be a folder with a top-level README that explains the project. Inside that folder, there would be several folders/files representing a specific phase of development. Each file/folder would contain prompts, instructions, descriptions, constraints, and lessons learned from building that phase of the application.

For example, you might have ten files.

The first file explains how to build the first iteration of the application. The second file introduces the next set of features. The third file expands the functionality further, and so on. By the time you reach the final file, the AI should have enough context and guidance to produce the complete application. Each instruction file could contain all footguns, issues, and mistakes that the AI missed or introduced when you originally vibe coded the project over the course of a week.

In other words, you’re packaging all of your hard-earned experience into a reusable format.

Going From Zero to Hero

If you package this into a self-contained recipe or cookbook and give it to someone else, they can load it into their coding agent.

The coding agent would then have access to all the information necessary to go from zero to hero in a single session because you’ve already consolidated everything that was learned during development.

And of course, the recipe could include much more than prompts. You could include:

• Custom agents
• Custom skills
• Custom documentation
• Architecture guidance
• Development workflows
• Testing requirements
• Security requirements

Essentially, you provide everything you would provide to a real developer. If there is documentation the AI needs, you include it. If there is a specific SQL schema or database layout, you include that as well.

You don’t necessarily need to provide any application source code. Instead, you provide the foundation - the necessary components and context the AI needs to build the application correctly.

The goal is simple:

I want to build what you’ve already figured out how to build, but I want to build it using my AI.

The Emergence of Vibe Recipe Packs

This opens up an interesting possibility. What if people started selling these recipes? Instead of writing software directly, you get paid for creating the recipe that allows someone else to generate the software. You could imagine entire marketplaces built around this idea.

• Someone wants to build a CRM? Someone has already created a recipe pack for that.
• Want to build a food planner web application? Someone has already created a recipe pack for that too.

You download the pack, point your coding agent at it, and wait for the application to be generated. The value is no longer necessarily the software itself. The value becomes the accumulated knowledge, constraints, workflows, documentation, and lessons learned that allow the software to be generated reliably.

Beyond Skills and Workflows

I could see this becoming a real thing in the future. We’re already seeing the rise of custom skills, custom agents, and bespoke workflows. Vibe recipes feel like a natural extension of that trend. A recipe is really just a reusable workflow combined with domain knowledge, architecture decisions, security guidance, business logic, and implementation instructions.

And just as people may eventually buy and sell custom AI skills and workflows, they may also buy and sell highly specialized vibe recipes.

The recipe becomes the product. The software is simply the output.