Build It, Then Use It: How I wrote 435 AI engineering lessons from scratch

说明与用途

一个关于如何遵循“先构建，后使用”规则创建435个AI工程课程的故事。该课程涵盖20个阶段，从线性代数到多智能体系统。每个算法首先使用NumPy从头实现，然后与生产库进行比较。这有助于开发者理解框架的内部机制，并增强使用它们的信心。

问题

There is a gap between using AI tools daily and feeling ready to ship production code. Frameworks like PyTorch and libraries like tiktoken act as black boxes, hiding the underlying mechanics. Most courses either teach math without code or code without math, leaving developers unable to debug or scale their implementations when issues arise.

结果

The author successfully created a 435-lesson, MIT-licensed curriculum called 'ai-engineering-from-scratch'. The curriculum covers 20 phases of AI engineering, from linear algebra to multi-agent systems. By following the 'Build It, Then Use It' rule, the author produced a resource that helps developers understand the internals of frameworks and build production-ready skills.

工作流

• Identify a core AI algorithm (e.g., attention, gradient descent).
• Implement the algorithm from scratch using only NumPy and standard libraries (Build It).
• Run the same input and data through the production framework (e.g., PyTorch, tiktoken).
• Compare the outputs of the custom implementation and the framework to verify numerical precision.
• Iterate through 20 phases, building increasingly complex systems (e.g., small LLM, agent loop, multi-agent system).
• Generate reusable artifacts like prompt templates, skill specs, and MCP servers for each lesson.

证据

The first time I wrote a tokenizer, I did it with a for loop. I counted byte pairs by hand, merged the most common ones, and waited about forty seconds for it to chew through a small corpus. The output was slow. The output was ugly. The output was correct.

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Then I ran the same input through tiktoken and watched it finish in forty milliseconds. That was the moment tiktoken stopped being magic. It was the same thing I had written the night before, in Rust, with the loop unrolled and the cache warm.

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I wrote 435 lessons under that rule. They live in a free, MIT-licensed curriculum called **ai-engineering-from-scratch**.

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