Learn the systems
by breaking✦ them.
Interactive system-design builds, LLM handbooks & agentic-engineering field notes — free and open source
Don't just read how large systems work — take one apart in the browser, watch it fall over, and build the intuition that sticks. Made by an AI engineer shipping in the open, with a little joy.
Tap a node to take it down — watch it reroute or fall over.
Come back tomorrow.
A fresh challenge and a lab every day — keep the streak alive.
Start with a subject, not a format.
Everything here actually runs.
Real Python & TypeScript, executed in your browser — no install, no backend. Every algorithm and system-design page carries an editor like this: read it, edit it, run it, break it.
Builds you can break.
System designs, AI systems, algorithms, and labs — every one is a working build. Build Netflix step by step, make the calls, break the system, run the quiz.
Design Netflix
Build a planet-scale video streaming service. See how the play path splits authorization from byte delivery, how origin storage and CDN edges serve immutable segments, how an adaptive-bitrate ladder adapts to any connection, how a parallel transcoding pipeline builds it, and how Open Connect, recommendations and QoE events fit together.
Design Uber
Build a planet-scale ride-hailing system. Learn how to handle real-time location tracking, matching algorithms, scalability, and payments.
Design WhatsApp
Build a real-time messaging system. See how persistent WebSockets, a session registry, offline inbox queues, the ✓✓ delivery receipts, group fan-out, media on a CDN, and end-to-end encryption fit together.
Design a URL Shortener
Build a URL shortener (think Bitly or TinyURL). Learn how to mint unique short codes with base62, make the read-heavy redirect path sub-millisecond with caching, shard billions of mappings, and track clicks asynchronously.
Design Instagram
Build a photo-sharing app. See how splitting media from metadata, a CDN for immutable images, async image processing, a precomputed feed cache, asynchronous like/view counters, TTL-based ephemeral stories, and sharding fit together to serve billions of photos.
Design a Conversational AI
Build a production conversational AI system (think ChatGPT). See how the request path splits an inference gateway from the model servers, how the context window is assembled and token-budgeted, how conversation memory is stored and recalled, how tokens stream back over a persistent connection, and how guardrails gate every prompt and response.
Design a RAG Pipeline
Build a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline. See how documents are chunked and embedded, how a vector store answers semantic search, how two-stage retrieval with reranking finds the best passages, how the prompt is grounded to stop hallucination, and how evals keep a quietly-drifting index honest.
Dijkstra: The Last Mile
Don't watch Dijkstra's algorithm — play it. Drive a courier through a living isometric city, lose the fastest route to your own instincts, then meet the Dispatcher who floods the streets to find the optimal path every time. Four acts: drive it, watch the frontier, predict the next lock, then break it with a negative cycle.
Binary Search: The Vault
Don't memorize binary search — play it. Crack a vault of sorted dials, burn through guesses by instinct, then meet the Halver who throws away half the search space with every single look and finds any value in O(log n). Three acts — crack it, watch the window collapse, predict the midpoint.
Gradient Descent: The Descent
Don't read about gradient descent — play it. Roll a ball into the valley of a loss landscape by hand and waste steps, then let the algorithm read the slope and step downhill on its own. Crank the learning rate until it overshoots and explodes, dial it down until it crawls, then switch on momentum to escape a local minimum. Four acts — descend it, follow the gradient, tune the learning rate, escape the trap.
The Tokenizer
A language model can't read words — it reads tokens. Watch your text shatter into sub-word chunks, race character vs word vs sub-word tokenizers head-to-head, then build Byte-Pair Encoding by hand: merge the most frequent pair over and over to grow a vocabulary and shrink the sequence. Five acts — shatter it, race three tokenizers, build BPE, tune the vocab size, and feel why 'strawberry' trips up an LLM.
Longer form, for when you're ready.✦
Full-length handbooks and visual roadmaps — agentic AI, LLM evals, RAG, Angular, Python. Free to read, take what you need.
The Prompting Handbook
A hands-on field guide for everyday humans — CRISP framework, real recipes, a drag-and-drop game, and a quiz. No code required.
The Prompting Handbook.
A friendly, hands-on field guide for everyday humans — learn the CRISP framework, spot bad prompts, practice with real recipes, play a drag-and-drop game, and test yourself with a quiz. No code required.
The Agentic AI Interview Handbook.
Twenty topics every senior AI engineer should be able to reason about live — from eval pipelines to reliability patterns for generative systems.
The Senior AI Engineer Interview Handbook.
60 questions across architecture, production incidents, agentic systems, RAG, evals, cost, safety, and leadership — what staff-level AI interviewers actually probe for.
50 Angular Interview Questions.
A visual handbook covering components, change detection, RxJS, signals, routing, forms, performance, and testing — what interviewers actually probe for in senior Angular roles.
50 Python Interview Questions.
Fundamentals to advanced: data structures, OOP, iterators & generators, the GIL, asyncio, memory, testing, and the standard library — a visual walk through everything a Python interview touches.
51 LLM Evals Interview Questions.
Golden sets, LLM-as-judge, regression testing, offline vs online evals, RAG evals, agent evals, red-teaming, and observability — demystified for interviews and production.
Prompt Engineering Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap from tokens and CRISP through chain-of-thought, RAG, and agent prompting to production monitoring. 18 stations across 3 tracks — interactive, free, your own pace.
Data Structures & Algorithms Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap from Big-O and arrays through hashing, sorting, and trees to graphs, Dijkstra, A*, and dynamic programming. 18 stations across 3 tracks — seven of them fully playable. Interactive, free, your own pace.
AI Engineer Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to become an AI engineer in 2026. From how LLMs work through embeddings, RAG, agents, and fine-tuning to evals, guardrails, inference serving, and observability. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Build, Production.
MLOps Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap for MLOps in 2026. From reproducibility, data versioning, and experiment tracking through training pipelines and model serving to monitoring, drift, governance, and LLMOps. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Pipelines, Operations.
System Design Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap for system design in 2026. From APIs, databases, caching, and load balancing through sharding, queues, consistent hashing, and consensus to end-to-end designs of Twitter, YouTube, and Uber. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Fundamentals, Building Blocks, Real Systems.
Generative AI Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap for generative AI in 2026. From how text and images are generated through diffusion, multimodal, sampling, and fine-tuning to evaluating, securing, and shipping generative products. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Techniques, Production.
Backend Engineer Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to become a backend engineer in 2026. From HTTP APIs, SQL, NoSQL, caching, and auth through API design, message queues, testing, and observability to Kubernetes, CI/CD, sharding, and reliability. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Core Backend, Production.
Frontend Engineer Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to become a frontend engineer in 2026. From HTML, CSS, layout, and JavaScript through TypeScript, React, state, and data fetching to bundlers, rendering, Core Web Vitals, and deployment. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Core Frontend, Production.
DevOps Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to become a DevOps engineer in 2026. From Linux, networking, Git, and Docker through CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes, and secrets to observability, SRE, GitOps, and cost. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Core DevOps, Production.
Data Engineer Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to become a data engineer in 2026. From SQL, Python, and data modeling through Spark, Kafka, Airflow, and dbt to data quality, governance, partitioning, and CDC. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Core Data, Production.
Machine Learning Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to become a machine learning engineer in 2026. From math and feature engineering through regression, trees, neural networks, CNNs, and transformers to experiment tracking, MLOps, drift, and responsible AI. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Core ML, Production.
Cloud / AWS Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to learn cloud engineering on AWS in 2026. From EC2, S3, VPC, and IAM through serverless, containers, IaC, and messaging to Well-Architected, multi-region, cost optimization, and DevOps. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Foundations, Core AWS, Production.
AI Harness Roadmap.
A visual transit-map roadmap to build an AI harness — the runtime around a model that turns it into an agent. From the messages API, tokens, and structured output through tool calling, the agent loop, context management, memory, and sandboxing to permissions, subagents, evals, observability, and cost control. 18 stations across 3 tracks — Model I/O, the Agent Loop, Production.
What's being built.
Open-source software for people who would rather ship than read think-pieces about shipping. All repositories MIT-licensed.
VolfPack — one long video into a week of shorts.
AI shorts factory for creators. Turns one long video — podcast, vlog, or stream — into 6–10 ready-to-post vertical shorts: auto clip selection, vertical framing, animated captions, and natural multilingual voiceovers. Review in seconds, post 10× more.
Inkwell — outreach intelligence that respects your tokens.
Open-source AI outreach intelligence for entrepreneurs. Scans Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt for real people with real problems — rule-based and token-free. Voice drafting is BYOK, on demand, in your own tone. Self-hosted, MIT-licensed, no lock-in.
PromptPlay
Transform natural language prompts into playable games using Claude. Describe your game idea and get complete HTML/JS code instantly. Build, test, and share games in minutes. 🎮
Games
A growing arcade of browser games built with PromptPlay — all open-source, all playable in the browser, no install required.
Writing from the bench.
Technical deep-dives, build logs, and hard-won opinions — published because the best way to understand something is to write it down publicly.
Built by an AI engineer who would rather ship things than talk about shipping things.
Vibe Engines is a one-person workshop publishing open-source tools, technical writing, and long-form handbooks at the intersection of LLMs, agentic systems, and developer tools. Everything here is made for the people doing the actual building — founders shipping MVPs on weekends, technical solopreneurs stitching together stacks, engineers trying to level up on the parts of AI that matter.
Nothing here is theoretical. Every repository ships something that works. Every handbook is written from the workshop floor, not the lecture hall. Some of the tools will get used. Some won't. That's the point of running a workshop in public — you get to find out.
Read more about the workshopBuild with the workshop.
The repositories are open, the issues are tagged, and contributions are welcome — from a typo fix to a whole module.
Contribute to a repository.
All projects are MIT-licensed and live on GitHub with open issues. Start with anything tagged good first issue or propose your own. PRs get reviewed fast.
Drop a line.
Working on something interesting? Want to collaborate, trade notes, or just say hello? Email finds its way here. Genuine messages get genuine replies.