README.md

Learning Resources

Curated resources for your 8-week AI engineering journey.

Essential Reading

AI Engineering Fundamentals

• Patterns for Building LLM-based Systems - Eugene Yan
• What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs - O'Reilly
• Building LLM Applications for Production - Chip Huyen
• LLM Patterns - Simon Willison

Vector Search & Embeddings

• What is Vector Search? - Pinecone
• OpenAI Embeddings Guide
• Understanding Vector Databases
• Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)

• Retrieval Augmented Generation - Original paper
• Advanced RAG Techniques
• RAG is More Than Just Embedding Search
• RAGAS: RAG Assessment Framework

Agents & Orchestration

• ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting - Original paper
• Building Autonomous Agents
• LangChain Agents
• Building Reliable Agents

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

• MCP Documentation
• MCP Specification
• Building MCP Servers
• MCP Examples

Video Resources

Fundamentals

• Andrej Karpathy: Intro to Large Language Models - 1hr
• Vector Databases Explained
• Building LLM Applications

Advanced Topics

• Fine-tuning vs RAG
• Building Production RAG Systems
• Multi-Agent Systems

APIs & Tools

LLM APIs

• Claude API - Primary
• OpenAI API
• Cohere API - For reranking

Vector Databases

• ChromaDB - Local, simple
• Qdrant - Production-ready
• Pinecone - Managed service
• pgvector - PostgreSQL extension

Frameworks

• LangChain
• LlamaIndex
• Haystack
• Semantic Kernel

Development Tools

• LangSmith - Observability
• Weights & Biases - Experiment tracking
• Helicone - LLM observability

Code Examples & Repositories

Semantic Search

• OpenAI Cookbook - Embeddings
• ChromaDB Examples

RAG Systems

• LangChain RAG Tutorial
• LlamaIndex Examples
• Advanced RAG Techniques

Agents

• LangGraph Examples
• AutoGPT
• BabyAGI

MCP Servers

• Official MCP Servers
• MCP TypeScript SDK
• MCP Python SDK

Community & Learning

Blogs to Follow

• Eugene Yan - ML/AI patterns
• Chip Huyen - ML systems
• Simon Willison - LLM experiments
• Lilian Weng - Deep technical posts
• Anthropic Blog

Newsletters

• The Batch - DeepLearning.AI
• TLDR AI
• Last Week in AI

Communities

• r/MachineLearning
• r/LangChain
• Anthropic Discord
• LangChain Discord

Papers (Optional Deep Dives)

Must-Read

• Attention Is All You Need - Transformers
• BERT - Pre-training
• GPT-3 - Language models
• RAG - Retrieval augmentation
• ReAct - Reasoning + Acting

Advanced

• Constitutional AI
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting
• Tree of Thoughts
• Toolformer

Week-Specific Resources

Week 1: Foundations

• Focus on embeddings and vector search fundamentals
• See above: Vector Search & Embeddings section

Week 2: Vector Databases

• Deep dive into vector DB documentation
• Compare ChromaDB, Qdrant, Pinecone, pgvector

Week 3: Production Patterns

• API design, multi-tenancy, observability
• Study FastAPI, async patterns

Week 4-5: RAG

• RAG papers and advanced techniques
• RAGAS evaluation framework

Week 6: MCP

• MCP documentation and examples
• TypeScript SDK tutorials

Week 7: Agents

• ReAct paper and implementations
• LangGraph tutorials

Week 8: Integration

• Full-stack development
• Next.js, deployment strategies

Quick Reference

API Keys Needed

• OpenAI API key
• Anthropic (Claude) API key
• Cohere API key (Week 5)
• Pinecone API key (Week 3)

Tools to Install

• Python 3.9+
• Node.js 18+ (for MCP, Week 6)
• Docker (for databases)
• Git & GitHub
• VS Code / Cursor
• PostgreSQL (Week 2)

Accounts to Create

• GitHub
• Vercel / Railway (deployment)
• Medium / Dev.to (blogging)
• LinkedIn (sharing)

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Pro Tip: Bookmark this page and refer back as you progress through the weeks. Add your own discoveries and resources!