A curated collection of must-use, actively maintained resources for building and shipping AI systems.
Focus: AI engineering (RAG, agents, evals, guardrails, deploy) plus the best books, guides, papers, and a carefully selected set of tools.
The foundations — these will still be valuable five years from now, even if today’s tools are gone.
Modern & Practical
- Designing Machine Learning Systems — Scalable, maintainable ML pipelines (Chip Huyen).
- Generative Deep Learning (2nd Edition) — GANs, VAEs, diffusion models (David Foster).
- AI Engineering — End-to-end AI product building (Chip Huyen).
- 100 Page Language Models Book — This book guides you through the evolution of language models, starting from machine learning fundamentals.
Foundational
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach — Comprehensive AI theory (Russell & Norvig).
- Deep Learning — Neural networks & architectures (Goodfellow, Bengio, Courville).
- Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd Edition) — RL fundamentals (Sutton & Barto).
Frameworks and design patterns for building robust, production-grade AI systems.
Personal note: you don't need tons of frameworks — start with simple LLM calls and work up.
- Building Effective Agents (Anthropic) — ⭐ Patterns, pitfalls, and tradeoffs for designing AI agents.
- OpenAI Agents Guide — Practical guide on building agents
- Google AI Agents Paper - Practical guide to building AI agents from Google
- Google Agents Companion Paper - Guide from Google
- OpenAI Cookbook — Example code, recipes, and best practices for working with OpenAI APIs.
- LLM Engineer Handbook — A goldmine of useful links for AI engineers
- PocketFlow — Extremely minimalist AI agent framework in just 100 lines of code. Fantastic way to learn.
- Google ADK — Google's Agent Development Kit (Python, Java). Great local development experience + A2A + MCP.
- Pydantic-AI — Typed, structured LLM orchestration framework built on Pydantic models for safe, predictable outputs.
- LangGraph — Build multi-agent workflows with stateful graphs on top of LangChain.
- CrewAI — Agent orchestration with structured tasks and human-in-the-loop controls.
- AutoGen — Microsoft’s framework for multi-agent conversation and collaboration.
- LlamaIndex — Data framework for ingesting, indexing, and querying private data with LLMs.
- Haystack — Open-source search/RAG framework with modular pipelines.
- Docling — Great library for ingesting any kind of document for RAG ⭐
- OpenAI Evals — OpenAI's framework for writing evals
Research that shaped modern AI — worth reading to understand the "why" behind today’s architectures.
- Attention Is All You Need — Transformer architecture.
- Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models — Model/data/compute scaling.
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners — GPT-3 capabilities.
- Constitutional AI — Safer model alignment.
Learn from the best — structured content for every level.
Beginner
Intermediate / Advanced
Focused
- DeepLearning.AI Short Courses
- Google Deepmind| Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
- Karpathy’s LLM Zero-to-Hero
- Neural Nets - Zero-to-Hero
Stay current with AI developments without drowning in noise.
Tools for building and deploying AI applications.
- ChatGPT — Best for general coding + reasoning.
- Claude — Best for long-context analysis and structured thinking.
- Gemini — Best for Google ecosystem integration.
- Perplexity — Best for quick research with live citations.
- Cohere — Best for enterprise LLMs with strong retrieval-augmented generation APIs.
- Mistral — Best for lightweight, high-performance open-weight models.
- Qwen — Best for multilingual and Chinese-first applications.
- DeepSeek — Best for efficient, cost-optimized large models with competitive reasoning.
- Claude Code — IDE extensions with long-context code edits.
- GitHub Copilot — In-IDE code completion, chat, and refactors.
- Cursor — LLM-powered IDE for multi-file edits and codebase-aware chat.
- ChatGPT-4o Image Generation — Integrated image creation with style control.
- Midjourney — Artistic and photorealistic images and video.
- Adobe Firefly — Integrated into Creative Cloud.
- Ideogram — Precise, legible text in generated images.
- Flux — High-res, prompt-editable images.
- Kling — Cinematic, realistic video generation.
- Google Veo 3 — High-quality video with synchronized audio.
- Runway — Video editing + generation.
- ElevenLabs — High-quality text-to-speech.
- Suno — AI music from text prompts.
- Aiva — Music composition for media.
