Dear friends,
Another year of rapid AI advances has created more opportunities than ever for anyone — including those just entering the field — to build software. In fact, many companies just can’t find enough skilled AI talent. Every winter holiday, I spend some time learning and building, and I hope you will too. This helps me sharpen old skills and learn new ones, and it can help you grow your career in tech.
To be skilled at building AI systems, I recommend that you:
- Take AI courses
- Practice building AI systems
- (Optionally) read research papers
Let me share why each of these is important.
I’ve heard some developers advise others to just plunge into building things without worrying about learning. This is bad advice! Unless you’re already surrounded by a community of experienced AI developers, plunging into building without understanding the foundations of AI means you’ll risk reinventing the wheel or — more likely — reinventing the wheel badly!
For example, during interviews with job candidates, I have spoken with developers who reinvented standard RAG document chunking strategies, duplicated existing evaluation techniques for Agentic AI, or ended up with messy LLM context management code. If they had taken a couple of relevant courses, they would have better understood the building blocks that already exist. They could still rebuild these blocks from scratch if they wished, or perhaps even invent something superior to existing solutions, but they would have avoided weeks of unnecessary work. So structured learning is important! Moreover, I find taking courses really fun. Rather than watching Netflix, I prefer watching a course by a knowledgeable AI instructor any day!
At the same time, taking courses alone isn’t enough. There are many lessons that you’ll gain only from hands-on practice. Learning the theory behind how an airplane works is very important to becoming a pilot, but no one has ever learned to be a pilot just by taking courses. At some point, jumping into the pilot's seat is critical! The good news is that by learning to use highly agentic coders, the process of building is the easiest it has ever been. And learning about AI building blocks might inspire you with new ideas for things to build. If I’m not feeling inspired about what projects to work on, I will usually either take courses or read research papers, and after doing this for a while, I always end up with many new ideas. Moreover, I find building really fun, and I hope you will too!
Finally, not everyone has to do this, but I find that many of the strongest candidates on the job market today at least occasionally read research papers. While I find research papers much harder to digest than courses, they contain a lot of knowledge that has not yet been translated to easier-to-understand formats. I put this much lower priority than either taking courses or practicing building, but if you have an opportunity to strengthen your ability to read papers, I urge you to do so too. (You can also watch an old video where I give advice on reading papers.) I find taking courses and building to be fun, and reading papers can be more of a grind, but the flashes of insight I get from reading papers are delightful.
Have a wonderful winter holiday and a Happy New Year. In addition to learning and building, I hope you'll also spend time with loved ones — that, too, is important!
Love,
Andrew