The vibe coding course that ends in a real product.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. We vibe-code the first draft of every internal tool ourselves — and then do the engineering work that makes it survive contact with real users. The discipline on this page is the version of vibe coding we actually ship.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot on it. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Why this page exists. “Vibe coding” is a useful term for the way most people now write software with AI — prompt, generate, accept, iterate, ship a screenshot. It is also where most of the work stops. The problem is that a screenshot is not a product, and a product is not a business. You leave the Academy with the same starting workflow you arrived with, plus the engineering and commercial discipline that turns a vibe into a deployed, paying product — the graduates do not call themselves vibe coders; they call themselves operators.
Coding · prompt-first, but disciplined
You will still write your starting code with the agent. You will also learn what to do with it next — reviewing, evals, observability, deploy, hardening. Auth, billing, Postgres, structured logs — the unsexy plumbing a vibe-coded screenshot never has. A deployed AI product by week twelve, not a tweet of a screenshot.
Commercials · the buyer who pays for the vibe
Most vibe-coded screenshots never see a real user. The Academy makes the buyer-discovery work the centre of half the cohort. Five live discovery calls by week three, pricing tested in front of real reactions, a one-page pilot agreement. A paid pilot by week six — the milestone that separates a vibe-coded toy from a vibe-coded company.
Investment · raising on a vibe-coded product
Cursor ($2.5bn), Lovable ($200m+), v0/Vercel, Bolt.new, Magic, Replit Agent — the AI-native tooling generation are themselves the canonical vibe-coded products that raised. Investors back the founders who ship fast and durable, not the ones who post screenshots. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Is this an anti-vibe-coding course?
No. The starting workflow is recognisably vibe coding — agent-first, prompt-driven, fast feedback. We just refuse to stop at the screenshot. The end of the twelve weeks is a deployed product with paying users.
Do I need to know what vibe coding is before applying?
No. If you have built anything with Cursor, Claude Code, Codex or a similar agent in the last year, you have already done it. The Academy formalises the muscle memory.
Will I learn to write code without the agent?
You will learn to read code without the agent, which is the actual moat. The agent writes; you review, harden and decide what ships. We train both halves.
How is this different from a YouTube vibe coding tutorial?
A tutorial shows you the prompt. The Academy hands you a real product to ship over twelve weeks, the production conditions to ship it under, and the operators who have shipped real revenue with the same stack. The deliverable is a deployed business, not a finished video.
What if I do not believe in “vibe coding” as a category?
Honest answer: neither do we, really. We use the term because it has captured a real shift in how software gets written. The course is recognisably about that shift, taught with rigour. If the language puts you off, ignore it and read the curriculum instead.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what you have been prompting your way through and what you would ship next. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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