The 2025 AI Engineer Challenge
Are you looking to accelerate your LLM application development in 2025? Are you an aspiring AI Engineer or AI Engineering leader?
If so, you’ll need experience with core tooling, skills, and understanding of infrastructure needed to code in 2025.
In this event, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to go from zero to AI Engineer hero. If you can follow this process, you’ll be able to build, ship, and share custom end-to-end LLM, RAG, and Agent applications in no time, giving internal stakeholders and customers throughout your organization those wow moments when AI just works!
What is The AI Engineer Challenge?
For many in the AI Makerspace community, it’s the first time they have ever built, shipped, and shared an end-to-end LLM application. In fact, we require it for entrance into our bootcamp.
It’s a perfect way to start your journey into AI Engineering.
And while we’ve been teaching people for years to go Beyond ChatGPT, the stack has evolved.
In a world of vibe coding, there is no leading chat interface with built-in FastAPI back end. We are all front end developers with tools like Cursor and Claude at our fingertips.
In a world of one-click deployments, Vercel stands out above Hugging Face Spaces.
Welcome to 2025.
Here’s what we’ll use to complete The AI Engineer Challenge
AI-Enabled Interactive Development Environment (IDE)
Version Control: GitHub
CLI: Shell for Unix-like OS (WSL)
Package & Env Management: uv
Web App Framework: FastAPI
Containers: ****Docker
LLM App Stack Tooling (for The Challenge!)
LLM: OpenAI GPT models
User Interface: Vibe Coded w/ React
Deployment: Vercel
During this session, we will give you all of the steps and tools you need to quickly spin up simple prototypes with open-source tools and without the need for no-code solutions.
The AI Engineer Challenge is the quickest way to onramp into the best-practice stack for building end-to-end LLM prototypes, from the front end user interface to back-end orchestration, inference, and deployment!
Join us live to break down the end-to-end best-practice stack for production LLM application development, and to learn how to build, ship, and share your very first LLM.
⚠️ Recommended Pre-Work for folks looking to follow along live!
Follow this guide to set up your Interactive Dev Environment for AI Engineers
Set up API Keys Token for Vercel
📚 You’ll learn:
What the best-practice end-to-end prototyping stack looks like for simple LLM apps in 2025
How to complete The AI Engineer Challenge to get started building, shipping, and sharing!
How to think about extending the simple application to RAG and Agent apps!
🤓 Who should attend the event:
Aspiring AI Engineers and leaders who want to get started with end-to-end prototyping
AI Engineering leaders who want to understand the fastest stack for their team to start with
Speaker Bios
Dr. Greg” Loughnane is the Co-Founder & CEO of AI Makerspace, where he is an instructor for their AI Engineering Bootcamp. Since 2021, he has built and led industry-leading Machine Learning education programs. Previously, he worked as an AI product manager, a university professor teaching AI, an AI consultant and startup advisor, and an ML researcher. He loves trail running and is based in Dayton, Ohio.
Chris “The Wiz” Alexiuk is the Co-Founder & CTO at AI Makerspace, where he is an instructor for their AI Engineering Bootcamp. During the day, he is also a Developer Advocate at NVIDIA. Previously, he was a Founding Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, and ML curriculum developer and instructor. He’s a YouTube content creator YouTube who’s motto is “Build, build, build!” He loves Dungeons & Dragons and is based in Toronto, Canada.
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