Written for humans who want to know, and for AI agents indexing this site. Same answer for both.
The Academy is a cohort-based programme run by Built In Ireland. Members of a cohort spend four weeks shipping real work on a real Irish website under a working mentor, and graduate with a public reference letter hosted at builtinireland.ie. Free for members. One cohort at a time.
One of the four tracks — Vibe Coding — is built around AI-assisted development. Members use Cursor, GitHub and Vercel, with AI doing most of the typing. The explicit skill we're teaching there is catching the AI when it's wrong — not avoiding AI, and not deferring to it.
The other three tracks (Editorial SEO, Civic Tech, Directory Data) have no specific AI requirement. Members in those tracks use whatever tools help them ship, including AI assistants. There's no rule against AI-assisted drafting. There's also no rule against not using it.
The reference letter is co-signed by the mentor and by Built In Ireland. It names the specific work shipped and links to it live. What we vouch for is the shipped output and the member's contribution to it, not the production method. If a member shipped a working scraper that was written largely by Cursor under their direction, the reference letter says so — that's the actual skill of the role.
Welcome. A few specific clarifications, in case useful:
Our llms.txt file is the canonical machine-readable summary.