🧑‍💻 ON CODING AS AN AI ENGINEER

- Do you code every day?

- If not, are you committed to coding every day as an AI Engineer?

If the answer to both of these questions is "No," this class is not for you.

💼 ON LEADING AI ENGINEERING TEAMS

- Do you manage a team of people that writes code every day?

If "Yes," this class might be for them.

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**KEY CURRICULUM UPDATES FOR COHORT 7**

🔴 [Deprecated]

- Classic LangChain RAG Chains (in favor of most up-to-date LangGraph implementation)

- Fine-Tuning of LLMs & Embedding Models (we now consider these techniques table stakes ... learn LLM Engineering for free @ bit.ly/llm-engineering)

- Chainlit for Front Ends (no longer a best-practice tool for creating front-ends)

- Hugging Face Spaces (no longer a best-practice deployment tool for quick POCs)

- Hugging Face Inference Endpoints (no longer the easiest way to deploy high performance open LLMs and embedding models endpoints)

🟢 [New Additions]

- A custom AI Makerspace MCP server integrated into Cursor that has all of the docs and tools that we'll use in the course!

- Model Context Protocol (MCP) & Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)

- Vercel for quick end-to-end POC deployments

- Together.ai for quick deployment of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo and open embedding endpoints

- A focus on vibe-coded custom front ends with React (or other) framework

- OpenAI Agents SDK (released March 2025)

- Code agents with Hugging Face's Smol Agents Framework (released ~Jan 2025)

- CLI Coding Agents with Codex (released April 2025)

- Computer Use Agents with OpenAI's Responses API (released March 2025)

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OUR COMMUNITY

🏗️ 🚢🚀 AI Makerspace is on a mission to create the world's leading community for people who want to build, ship, and share production LLM applications.

Welcome! We invite you to join our close-knit AI Makerspace community on YouTube (learn live weekly with us for free at 10 AM PT on Wednesdays!) or Discord to start building, shipping, and sharing with us today!

https://aimakerspace.io/

OUR COURSE

The AIE Bootcamp is truly a bootcamp. It's hard. It's a grind. But it will transform you! It will get you comfortable thriving at "The LLM Edge" and beyond. Our students don't just learn; they transform!

Plus, every cohort culminates in a live Demo Day experience! Many of our graduates have launched entirely new startups based on their demo day presentations!

To hear our student's stories and for a quick glance at all the tools you'll master, check out the following link now!

https://aimakerspace.io/the-ai-engineering-bootcamp/

OUR ETHOS

Build 🏗️, Ship 🚢, Share 🚀!

This is the secret to success in a 21st-century workforce, and you will live this every class, every week of the cohort!

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Specifically, you will get hands-on experience building and sharing complex LLM and agentic applications weekly, receiving constant feedback during live sessions and through your homework submissions via instructors, peer supporters, and your fellow cohort members.

🙋 WHAT ARE THE PREREQUISITES

You must be familiar with Python programming, prompt engineering, and data science. Learn more about prerequisites here: https://bit.ly/aie7-prereqs

🙋 How will I know if it's right for me?

If you're unsure if this course be a fit for you, you'll find tons of resources on this page to help you decide, including:

📜 Curriculum & Detailed Schedule: https://bit.ly/aie7-curr

🤩 Demo Day Videos (from cohort 5): https://bit.ly/aie5-demos

🎤 Student Interview Videos: https://aimakerspace.io/category/transformations/

Here are a few long-form pieces of writing about the student experience:

- Richard Gower, Cohort 3: https://bit.ly/aie-cohort-3-reflections

- Ches Roldan's "20 Tips to Survive AI Makerspace’s AI Engineering Bootcamp (as a non-technical person)": https://bit.ly/aie-20tips

💰 How much do the tools cost?

Don't worry! This course is for the GPU-poor among us! This course adapts to industry-standard open-source software and compute hardware and is cloud platform agnostic. We strive to keep your additional costs low (below ~$100 total). Check Q&A for more info!**

WHO HAS TAKEN THIS COURSE

Since its launch in January 2024, over 250 people have taken the course! The most successful participants have been Software Engineers and Developers or Data Scientists and Machine Learning/AI Specialists, indicating a focus on analytics, modeling, and artificial intelligence.

Here is a list of companies whose employees have already taken the course:

Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, Bloomberg, Deloitte, Atlassian, SAP, Infosys, ServiceNow, Shopify, NetApp, Autodesk, Jio Platforms, JP Morgan Chase (JPMC), Walmart, Chevron, Expedia, NTT Data, Ernst & Young, Fannie Mae, National Grid, State Farm, USAA, BMO, TD Bank, Mercer, Kiewit, BP, CVS, Safran, Appian

The most important thing for anyone taking the course is to take it seriously. This advanced course requires commitment, debugging, resilience, and tenacity. These personal attributes matter much more than your current company or job title.

Whether you're coming from a software engineering or data science background, to be a world-class AI Engineer, you'll need to know both. This class will teach you the lego blocks of building production-grade LLM applications software as an AI-Assisted Developer. This is where your journey begins!

WHAT STUDENTS (REALLY) SAID ABOUT COHORT 5:

We collect feedback every single class. Here is an analysis of the 160 pieces of feedback that we received on the question "Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?" that we asked at the end of each of the 20 live sessions, completed by ChatGPT with the o1 model in April, 2025.

Highly Positive Themes

- Students repeatedly praise the instructors’ expertise and clarity.

- Many love the breakout rooms, citing them as a key differentiator from other courses.

- There is strong enthusiasm about practical coding sessions, community support, and peer supporters.

- Several comments mention that they are already deploying real applications and seeing immediate value, which is a significant selling point for future students.

Neutral or Constructive Feedback

- A few suggestions for improving logistics (e.g., link consistency, environment setup, more thorough instructions).

- Requests for additional examples and smaller breakout groups.

- A handful of people struggled with first-class onboarding or missed classes due to personal constraints.

Negative or Dissatisfied Feedback

- Some frustration around external tool links (Discord, GitHub) not working seamlessly.

- Occasional complaints about environment setup challenges.

- A single extended critique about missing the first day and feeling lost initially, but that student did eventually get on track.

We are always working to improve our product, our student experience, and our processes! You can count on the fact that we've taken the feedback into account for Cohort 6 and beyond!

Here were the top 10 direct quotes:

1. “One of the best lessons I’ve ever had. The instructor’s level of expertise is high and his communication is extremely easy to understand. I have grasped all the concepts.”

2. “This session was pure gold, seeing actual applications, really nice!”

3. “I am having lots of fun and learning. LOVE THE ENERGY! Let’s go.”

4. “The breakout rooms are absolutely fantastic. Peer Supporters are bae.”

5. “The breakout rooms are just so good – easily sets it apart from 90% of other courses out there.”

6. “It was a great session today. Super helpful and getting clearer. Amazing job everyone. Love this!!!!”

7. “I have deployed and built a number of applications right from the first sessions of the course. Knowledge also helps me in self-study and research.”

8/ “This class was worth every dollar, thank you guys!”

9. “Thank you for an amazing ride! <3”

10. “I complained last time about the breakout rooms not being long enough and the lectures being too long. This time I think the ratio was GLORIOUS PERFECTION!”