Prompt Contracts: How I Stopped Vibe Coding and Started Shipping Real Software With AI (Build With AI Book 2)

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You typed a perfectly reasonable prompt. The AI gave you code that looked right. You pasted it, ran it, and something broke — not with a dramatic error, but with the quiet wrongness of a function that handles the happy path and nothing else. No input validation. No error states. Auth that works in the demo and leaks in production.So you reprompted. And reprompted. And three iterations later you're debugging code you didn't write, fixing problems you could have prevented.The problem isn't the AI. The problem is that you're giving it a napkin sketch and expecting architectural blueprints.This is a field manual from a solo developer who ships production software with AI every single day. I mean actual products with actual users and actual billing — not weekend demos that get shut down on Monday when the free tier expires.The framework at the center is called a prompt contract — a structured specification you write before a single line of code exists. It tells the AI exactly what to build, how to build it, what not to do, and how you'll verify the result. Ten minutes of writing. Roughly half the total time per task. First-try code that actually survives production.A prompt is "build me a login page." A prompt contract is a one-page document that specifies the auth provider, the redirect behavior, the error states, the session handling, and the three things that must never happen. One produces demo code. The other produces production code.Inside you'll find the complete prompt contract framework with copy-paste templates, a full tech stack walkthrough and a deep tour of Claude Code that goes way beyond autocomplete, and the verification loop: how the AI tests its own code in the browser before you take delivery. There's also a complete SaaS build from zero to first paying customer in a weekend (I've done it, it's not magic, it's just method), a chapter on replacing a $200/month AI subscription with a $15/month self-hosted setup, five automation patterns that survive production in n8n and Make, and an honest take on no-code tools 🙃.Actually on that last point — Make.com is fine if your definition of "production" is a Zapier alternative for personal use. The moment you need real error handling, retry logic, or anything that has to keep running at 3am without your supervision, you're going to have a bad time. Anyway. The book covers this.And then the real game of shipping solo: burnout, scope creep, money, loneliness. That chapter isn't technical. It might be the most useful one.Every chapter includes a QR code linking to a companion GitHub repository with runnable code, importable workflows, and templates you can use today. The repo is half the product — maybe more than half, honestly 💀.This isn't a programming course and it's not documentation. It's what I wish had existed when I started shipping solo with AI: opinionated, specific, built from production scars. With opinions that might make you throw this book across the room — which means they're probably worth having.Your AI has been waiting for better instructions. Give it a contract.

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