Ask HN: Where should an experienced developer start learning AI development?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685702

15 9 9 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

For an experienced software developer looking to get started in AI development. What online courses would you recommend for someone entering this area of development today?

Any guidance on where to begin or which areas to focus on would be greatly appreciated. While I prefer online courses, I’m also open to other learning formats like books, YouTube channels, or tutorials.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

sloaken• 9 months ago

As a developer, my first step was to take an online class on how to prompt for chat gpt et el.

My second class is on to go agentic AI (calling AI from a program).

I recently attended a short presentation on RAG (ask Chat GPT). This filled in a lot of holes in my brain about LLMs.

galaxy_gas• 9 months ago

Pls clarify if you wish to develop AI such as new models and writing code that interacts with GPU or develop FOR ai such as GPT wrapper

productiveminds2• 9 months ago

Both sounds good but developing for ai such as GPT wrapper sounds more beginner-friendly. Thank you

nicohayes2• 9 months ago

Are you trying to build AI applications or research AI itself? Completely different paths.

If it's the former - skip the math and start calling APIs. OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models via Replicate. Spend a week building something real: add a chatbot to your product, build a document Q&A system, whatever solves an actual problem.

The deep learning theory? You can learn that later if you actually need to fine-tune models or optimize inference. Most developers never do. Don't let the AI hype convince you that you need a PhD to ship useful AI features.

nicohayes2• 9 months ago

Are you trying to build AI applications or research AI itself? Completely different paths.

Focus on prompt engineering, handling token limits, streaming responses, managing costs, error handling. These are the 80% of "AI development" for application builders.

productiveminds2• 9 months ago

Thank you

barrenko• 9 months ago

It's basically Typescript / and / or Python engineering, working with streaming data, calling APIs as others mentioned. Try to pick apart an agent framework, such as Mastra or any of the million others. If you're a solid engineer you have all the AI building skills you need, just go build.

ls-a• 9 months ago

The best way in my opinion is learning from an open source project that is trying to do something similar to what you want.

0xCE0• 9 months ago

If one is "experienced software developer", I'd say one then can guide oneself to right direction for learning by starting asking the most basic/obvious/childish questions, e.g. what libraries/languages/datasets/data formats/concepts is needed to understand and map/chart the territory (yes, that is what OP is basically doing now, asking but not just barreling into messy action) with a goal to create a minimal prototype.

True experienced developers have learned how to solve any programming problem. This related reading was actually yesterday mentioned at HN: https://beej.us/guide/bglcs/

Ask HN: Where should an experienced developer start learning AI development?

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