Project Roadmap

AI Practice & Projects

Reading about LLMs and reading about vectors doesn't make you an AI practitioner — building things does. This page is a project ladder, not a lesson plan: beginner, intermediate, and advanced projects that force you to actually wire up an API, chunk a document, evaluate a model, or ship something that runs.

Why Build Projects?

The gap between "I understand RAG" and "I've built a RAG app" is the whole game

Tutorials make everything look smooth: the API key always works, the dataset is always clean, the model always returns valid JSON. Real projects don't cooperate like that, and that friction is exactly where the learning happens — debugging a rate limit, handling a malformed response, realizing your retrieval step is returning irrelevant chunks. A portfolio of small, real, finished projects teaches you more per hour than another course, and it's also the thing that actually gets noticed in an interview or a GitHub profile.

The projects below are ordered by difficulty, not by topic, so you can start wherever your current skills land. Beginner projects get you comfortable calling AI APIs and handling their output. Intermediate projects introduce real architecture — retrieval, memory, fine-tuning. Advanced projects combine multiple moving parts into something closer to a production system. Pick one, finish it, then move to the next tier.

Quick intro — how to pick your first AI project

A quick primer before you start. Opens in a small player, no need to leave the page.

Beginner Projects

Get comfortable calling AI APIs and handling what comes back

Beginner

Intermediate Projects

Add real architecture: retrieval, memory, and fine-tuning

Intermediate

Advanced Projects

Combine multiple moving parts into something closer to a production system

Advanced

Pick one and ship it

Twelve projects across three tiers. Don't try to do them all at once — finish one, push it to GitHub with a real README, and let the next tier be the thing that makes the previous one feel easy.

Where next?

Keep exploring by domain or drill into a single skill

Video