No fluff. No hype.
Just the path that builds real skill — fast.
Here’s exactly where I’d start (and how I’d go deep):
𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟬: Prerequisites You Can’t Skip
Build the intuition that’ll serve you forever.
→ Deep Learning Specialisation by Andrew Ng https://lnkd.in/gwqSPS4J
→ “Deep Learning” by Ian Goodfellow et al https://lnkd.in/grDi7rWE
𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟭: Understand LLMs First — Before You Build
Most people skip this. Don’t.
→ Intro for busy users: https://lnkd.in/gg-NYzPe (Karpathy)
→ Deep dive into LLMs: https://lnkd.in/gCbqG56i (Karpathy)
→ The Core Paper: “Attention Is All You Need” https://lnkd.in/gXUccydp
→ Stanford CS25: https://lnkd.in/gUzsiN_e
→ Or read my NeoSage breakdowns for faster intuition
Issue 1: https://lnkd.in/g2pXsyHn
Issue 2: https://lnkd.in/gPimp6mv
𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟮: Learn Prompting Like a Developer, Not a Dabbler
Prompting is design thinking, not guesswork.
→ OpenAI Prompt Guide https://lnkd.in/gqjcPxcQ
→ Prompting Guide https://lnkd.in/ga7FuQRT
→ Mini-Course: https://lnkd.in/gHwMeZzp
𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟯: Get Your Hands Dirty — Application Layer
→ Get started with RAG here: https://lnkd.in/gTkNFRAz
Build these:
→ Chatbot
→ Fine-tune a model
→ Build a RAG pipeline from scratch
here https://lnkd.in/gbdiAkPD
𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽 𝟰: Go Deeper — Think in Systems
This is where 95% stop. And where real engineers begin.
→ Frameworks: Learn LangChain, LangGraph, and how they shape workflows
→ Protocols:
• Model Context Protocol (Article to get started: https://lnkd.in/gfdJqGU4)
• Google’s A2A
→ Agents: Learn about planning, memory, and inter-agent coordination. Resources: https://lnkd.in/gFfxtN-c
→ Evaluations: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it
𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗜 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴
• Deeplearning . ai
• OpenAI Academy
• Google’s white papers on Agents
• Andrej Karpathy’s YouTube Channel
• Hugging Face
• The Neural Maze by Miguel— newsletter with hands-on projects
• The LLM Engineer's Handbook by Paul & Maxime
• NeoSage by Yours Truly: systems thinking & intuition-first AI engineering https://blog.neosage.io
If I had to start all over again in 2025?
I’d follow this and ignore everything else.
Save it. Share it. Restart here.
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