Foundations8-10 hoursAvailable Now

AI Fundamentals for Developers

Understanding LLMs, Transformers, and the AI Development Stack

Build a solid foundation in AI concepts from a developer's perspective. Understand how LLMs work, explore the AI development stack, and master prompt engineering for code generation.

Based on:Industry Best Practices

Learning Objectives

Understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) work at a conceptual level

Explain transformers, embeddings, and attention mechanisms

Differentiate between AI, ML, Deep Learning, and Generative AI

Recognize when to use AI vs traditional programming approaches

Topics Covered

What is AI? A Developer's Perspective

The evolution from rule-based systems to neural networks

2 hours

How LLMs are trained: pre-training, fine-tuning, RLHF

Understanding tokens, context windows, and model parameters

The economics of AI: API costs, latency, and throughput

The AI Development Stack

Comprehensive overview of AI tools and platforms

3 hours

LLM providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, open-source models

Vector databases: Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma

Orchestration frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel

Agent frameworks: LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen

Deployment platforms: Vertex AI, Azure AI, AWS Bedrock

Prompt Engineering for Developers

Advanced techniques for effective AI prompting

3 hours

Zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting

System prompts vs user prompts

Prompt templates and variables

Structured output generation (JSON, XML)

Prompt chaining for complex workflows

Hands-On Projects

Code Documentation Generator

beginner2 hours

Build a code documentation generator using prompt engineering

Bug Analysis Assistant

beginner2 hours

Create a bug analysis assistant with structured output

Code Review Workflow

intermediate3 hours

Implement a multi-step code review workflow

Learning Resources

Videos, articles, and courses to deepen your understanding

But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers

3Blue1Brown•27 min

Visual explanation of how transformers work

Intro to Large Language Models

Andrej Karpathy•1 hour

Comprehensive overview of LLMs by OpenAI co-founder

Attention Is All You Need

Google Research

The original transformer paper

Prompt Engineering Guide

DAIR.AI

Comprehensive guide to prompt engineering techniques

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers

DeepLearning.AI•1 hour

Free course by Andrew Ng and OpenAI

OpenAI API Documentation

OpenAI

Official API docs and best practices

Module Progress

Not started

Recommended Resources

External learning resources to supplement your training.

Assessment

Prompt engineering challenge + LLM architecture quiz + Project submission