louisfb01/start-ai-engineering

What it solves

This is a complete, practical guide for anyone with zero or minimal programming or AI background who wants to become a strong AI engineer in 2026. The field has moved far beyond simple prompting, and this guide collects the videos, articles, books, courses, and real projects you need to build the judgment that sits behind AI systems: deciding what to build, choosing architectures, evaluating results, and knowing when something is safe to ship.

How it works

The guide is organized by how you like to learn: short YouTube videos, long-form books, online courses, hands-on projects, and topic-specific deep dives. It covers the full modern AI engineering stack: context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings and vector databases, tools and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), workflows, agents, multi-agent systems, evaluations and observability, fine-tuning, multimodal and voice applications, deployment, and security. Each resource carries a difficulty marker from 1 to 10, so you can start at your level. There is no single correct order; a suggested default path starts with foundational videos, then one free course, one or two books, two or three small projects, and finally evaluations, tracing, and deployment.

Who it's for

People with zero or little background in programming, AI, or machine learning who want to become AI engineers in 2026. It also suits developers who already know some Python and want to move into LLM-based systems. The guide explicitly warns against blindly relying on coding agents and emphasizes building the decision-making layer behind AI work.

Highlights

• Almost everything is free; paid resources are clearly labelled and some links are affiliate links that support the guide at no extra cost.
• Covers the full 2026 AI engineering stack, from prompting to reasoning models, RAG, agents, evals, fine-tuning, voice, and deployment.
• Includes a difficulty rating (1-10) for every resource, so you can pace yourself.
• Suggests a default learning path for beginners and offers a personalization prompt you can paste into an AI coding agent.
• Curated by Louis-François Bouchard, an AI engineer who hires for consulting work at Towards AI, and updated throughout 2026.