Open-source free course: from engineer to AI engineer
Understand this story
Author joelstevick has open-sourced the companion code repository engineer-to-ai-engineer for the YouTube series "From engineer to AI engineer," aimed at senior software engineers with no generative AI background; the course is free and starts from scratch. The repository is organized by season: Season 1's 8 episodes start from traditional software engineering and build up a first RAG retrieval pipeline episode by episode; Season 2's 7 episodes build an evaluation framework on the same repository. Each episode corresponds to one commit and one Git tag (s1e1 through s1e8, s2e1 through s2e7); checking out the corresponding tag gives the complete code as of the end of that episode. Running the course requires your own Anthropic API key. The author says the evaluation framework caps spending at $1 per run and $5 cumulative in the ledger, and the test suite does not call the model; each run of the series costs a few cents, and each episode's chapter notes explain the cost of its commands.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 2 days ago
Coverage timeline
Follow the coverage to explore different perspectives.
- Hacker News AIShow HN: A free course from engineer to AI engineer, one Git tag per episode
A free YouTube-based course, "From engineer to AI engineer," teaches experienced software engineers with no generative-AI background to build a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline in eight episodes, with a second seven-episode series, "Prove it works," building an evaluation harness on the same repository. Each episode is one commit and one Git tag (s1e1–s1e8 and s2e1–s2e7), so checking out a tag reproduces the repository exactly as that episode leaves it. The series uses TypeScript, SQLite, curl and an HTTP server, answering with claude-sonnet-5-5 over a fictional 26,000-word corpus (Lantern Supply Co.) that includes deliberate traps such as near-identical product names and a policy changed in later release notes.
Activity for this story
- Current comparable activity
- 3
- Peak comparable activity
- 10Nov 12 22:00
- Change in the past 24 hours
- -50%
Trends compare the same fully observed participants, which may cover fewer participants than current activity. Move the pointer or tap the chart to inspect hourly activity; use the left and right arrow keys with a keyboard.