AI Engineer Study Library

Study plans

Three week-by-week plans through the library, built from the free resources and posts of Bashiri Smith and Melvin Vivas. Pick the one that fits your time. In the library app, the Study plans tab lets you tick items off; the ticks are saved in your browser and shared with the other tabs.

  1. 1-month plan: the fast track

    Build one portfolio project in four weeks: an assistant over your own documents that grows from a prompted LLM call to RAG, evals and tools, and ends as a deployed, traced API while you start applying.

    4 weeks · about 15 hours a week

    1. Week 1: LLMs, prompts and APIs
    2. Week 2: Embeddings and RAG
    3. Week 3: Evals, then tools and agents
    4. Week 4: Ship it and start applying
  2. 2-month plan: the standard path

    Eight weeks on one capstone, an assistant that answers questions about your own documents, from the foundations through RAG, agents, evals and deployment to a portfolio case study and the job search.

    8 weeks · about 10 hours a week

    1. Week 1: Roadmap and foundations
    2. Week 2: LLMs and prompting
    3. Week 3: Embeddings and vector search
    4. Week 4: RAG
    5. Week 5: Agents, tools and MCP
    6. Week 6: Evals and guardrails
    7. Week 7: Deploy, monitor, fine-tune
    8. Week 8: Design, portfolio, job search
  3. 3-month plan: the thorough path

    Twelve weeks through all sixteen topics on one project, an assistant over documents you know, that grows from a single LLM call into an evaluated, guarded and deployed RAG agent with a small fine-tuned router.

    12 weeks · about 8 hours a week

    1. Week 1: Map the role and plan
    2. Week 2: How neural networks learn
    3. Week 3: LLM fundamentals and APIs
    4. Week 4: Prompts and coding agents
    5. Week 5: Embeddings and vector search
    6. Week 6: RAG that holds up
    7. Week 7: Agents, tools and MCP
    8. Week 8: Evals and guardrails
    9. Week 9: Ship, trace and control cost
    10. Week 10: Fine-tuning and system design
    11. Week 11: Portfolio week
    12. Week 12: Job search and trends

Unofficial: not affiliated with or endorsed by the creators. The order follows the learning path.