Ask HN: Best developer guides to modern AI | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best developer guides to modern AI

10 pointsaristofun4 comments

Similar questions pop up here regularly. This one is with certain angle.

Any software engineers working or seriously playing with modern llm and generative models — please share your personal top 5 resources that you think are good for fellow developers to ramp up to speed and start using them in production with some basic general understanding of how they work.

Books, blogs, courses, lectures, anything.

No scientific or math heavy articles. No philosophy or history, no debates or controversy.

Purely practical guides, books, courses that teach, show, explain modern ai landscape from software developer perspective.

Something like Kleppman’s book, but for ai.

Thank you.

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There are almost none because everything goes obsolete in a month. In 6 months, it's deprecated. Nearly every book or guide you find will be outdated by the time it's released and the people who write them are getting exhausted with this loop.

I once wrote slides on how to give AI context so it can code. When I asked a friend to proofread it, GPT-4 came out and it was smart enough to make all my techniques obsolete. I updated my workflow for it, and then Cursor came out, basically automating all the indexing and stuff in seconds while I'd take days.

There's YouTube, but they tend to be brief and look like hype or unedited. Most of the good stuff is experimental, but experimental isn't helpful and shouldn't be. If you want names: techfren and Sabrina Ramonov

The new GPT-4o image update is just amazing. It compounds with the new memory update less 24 hours ago. I could write pages about why but I'd rather just make stuff with it. Anyone who's getting excited about it but not using it is a bit of a hypocrite.

Just treat it like a skateboard. No book. You'll fall many times at first. Have fun with it. You don't have to go anywhere, just go around the block. Join one of the many hackathons out there and do something with it. It'll click.

Make good use of Cunningham's Law - just exclaim that it can't do Y, and someone will explain how it does Y. Like the skater community, people want to see you do tricks.

For general understanding of LLMs, Andrej Karpathy's recent deep dive is a great intro: https://youtu.be/7xTGNNLPyMI

> No scientific or math heavy articles. No philosophy or history, no debates or controversy.

If you're ruling out all this, then basically the only salient information you need is how to boot up Ollama with GPU acceleration.

Some general knowledge wouldn’t hurt. But i dont see much philosophy or heavy math in kleppman’s or many other books and it doesn’t make them less valuable

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