Transform Software Engineers into AI Engineers

A comprehensive learning initiative featuring curated resources, hands-on milestones, and live mentorship sessions to help you master AI engineering skills.

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Cohort #1 Active
4 Milestones Published

Learning Milestones

Follow our structured learning path to master AI engineering concepts and tools through hands-on practice and expert guidance.

1
Cohort #1 • Post #1

Explore AI Coding Tools (Bolt, Replit, Cursor, WindSurf)

Get hands-on experience with the most powerful AI-powered development tools available today.

Learning Steps:

1

Watch or read "An Opinionated Guide on the Best AI Coding Tools in 2025"

Learn about the current landscape of AI coding tools and their capabilities.

2

Build a prototype with Bolt

Read the blog post about Bolt.new and create your own prototype. Reply to the original post with your prototype link.

3

Create a full stack app with Replit

Watch the developer experience video and build your own full-stack application.

4

Install Cursor on your machine

Watch the tutorial and implement the Momentum Chrome extension following the blog post guide.

5

Install WindSurf Editor on your machine

Watch the demonstration video and implement the bike shop app on your local machine.

Live AMA Session

Wednesday, June 4, 2025 at 9:30 am PST

Bring your questions, discuss progress, and connect with peers.

Published: 5/31/2025 View Details
2
Cohort #1 • Post #2

Prompt Engineering, RAG, Evaluation Frameworks

Master the fundamentals of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and evaluation methodologies.

Learning Steps:

1

Prompt Engineering

Read and/or watch the videos on "The Prompt Report Parts 1 and 2" from Oxen.ai and read OpenAI's guidelines for text generation and prompting.

2

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Read LangChain's overview on RAG, implement their tutorial on building a search engine over a PDF document, and read Cameron Wolfe's practitioner's guide.

3

Evaluation

Read about RAG evaluation metrics and learn about RAGAS framework for automated evaluation of RAG systems.

Live AMA Session

Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 9:30 am PST

Please reply below or DM me to get the Zoom link to the live AMA session. Bring your questions, discuss progress and connect with peers.

Published: 6/30/2025 View Details
3
Cohort #1 • Post #3

How to Make a Chatbot

Learn the complete process of building modern chatbots like ChatGPT, from understanding transformer architecture to training with human feedback.

Learning Steps:

1

Overview

Watch Andrej Karpathy's video, "Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT", which covers all the steps that go into making a modern chatbot like ChatGPT.

2

Understand the Transformer Network Architecture

Read Jay Alammar's "The Illustrated Transformer" blog post that visually explains the Transformer neural network architecture.

3

Pre-train to get a base model, Post-train via Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to get a chatbot aligned with human preferences

Read Sebastian Raschka's "LLM Training: RLHF and its Alternatives" blog post. Read and watch the video on Oxen.ai's "Training Language Models to Follow Instructions (InstructGPT)" blog post.

Live AMA Session

Wednesday, October 15, 2025 at 9:30 am PST

Please reply below to get the Zoom link to the live AMA session. Bring your questions, discuss progress and connect with peers.

Published: 9/30/2025 View Details
4
Cohort #1 • Post #4

Agentic AI — From Chatbots to Autonomous Agents

Learn how to build autonomous AI agents that can use tools, plan, reflect, and collaborate with other agents.

Learning Steps:

1

Foundation — What Are Agents and Why Do They Matter?

Take Dr. Andrew Ng's "Agentic AI" short course on DeepLearning.AI. Learn agentic design patterns — reflection, tool use, planning, and multi-agent collaboration.

2

Building and Engineering Agents

Read Anthropic's "Building Effective Agents" guide and their follow-up article "Effective Context Engineering for AI Agents". Build AI agents and feed them the right context (prompts, memory, tool outputs, etc.).

3

Evaluating Agents

Read Anthropic's "Demystifying Evals for AI Agents". Build evaluation frameworks to measure and improve agent reliability.

4

Multi-Agent Systems in Practice

Read Anthropic's case study on building their multi-agent research system. Learn how multiple specialized agents can coordinate on a complex task.

5

Agent Protocols — Connecting Agents to Tools and Each Other

Read the intro to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and take DeepLearning.AI's course on the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. MCP connects agents to tools; A2A connects agents to agents.

Live AMA Session

Wednesday, April 8, 2026 at 9:30 am PST

Please reply below to get the Zoom link to the live AMA session. Bring your questions, discuss progress and connect with peers.

Published: 3/22/2026 View Details
New milestones published regularly

About AI Engineer Academy

A structured learning initiative designed to bridge the gap between traditional software engineering and AI engineering through practical, hands-on experience.

Curated Learning Path

Each milestone contains carefully selected resources including blog posts, videos, tutorials, and research papers to ensure comprehensive learning.

Hands-On Experience

Build real projects and prototypes using cutting-edge AI tools like Bolt, Cursor, Replit, and more to gain practical experience.

Community Learning

Join live AMA sessions to discuss progress, ask questions, and connect with fellow engineers on the same learning journey.