Ask HN: Transitioning from Web Development to AI–Where to Start?
One thing I’m sure of: I don’t want to develop my own models but rather use existing ones effectively. Given my family responsibilities and where I am in life, I can’t afford to take a deep dive into advanced math.
How can I leverage my web dev and system design experience to transition into AI? What paths should I explore that don’t require heavy theoretical math but still let me work with AI meaningfully? Any practical wisdom or real-world advice would be greatly appreciated!
Here is some JD I copied from one of the job postings. Hoping to build a similar knowledge base :
Experience with model fine-tuning and/or implementing RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) systems in production Experience with LLM frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar orchestration tools Familiarity with different LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and their APIs Familiarity with the use of Open LLMs, either self-hosted or on through a third party provider, e.g. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge of LLM output validation and safety measures Experience with embeddings and semantic search implementations