My AI Learning Roadmap — 6 Months In, Here’s What Matters

A senior frontend engineer shares lessons from six months of learning AI, arguing that most developers waste time starting with heavy math and ML theory instead of practical API usage. Through personal experience and examples of others who mastered theory but couldn't build real systems, the author concludes that starting with LLM APIs (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI) is far more effective than studying gradient descent or reading research papers for production AI work.