AI Engineer roadmap: mind map
A mind map of the full roadmap.sh/ai-engineer topic set (169 nodes, 17 branches), for planning and scheduling. Three formats, use whichever your tool likes:
| File | Open it with |
|---|---|
ai-engineer-roadmap.xmind |
XMind: double-click to open directly. |
ai-engineer-roadmap.opml |
XMind, MindNode, Freeplane, OmniOutliner, most mind-map tools (File → Import → OPML). |
ai-engineer-roadmap.md |
Any editor (readable as-is); XMind also imports Markdown (File → Import → Markdown). |
If the
.xmindever won't open in your XMind version, import the.opmlor.mdinstead, same content. To edit the map, changeai-engineer-roadmap.mdand re-generate, or just edit in XMind.Full node-by-node audit: see coverage.md: every one of the 169 nodes mapped to where it's taught.
Roadmap section → course module (for scheduling)
Where each roadmap branch is taught in this course (covered · partial · planned · out of scope):
| Roadmap branch | Course module |
|---|---|
| Introduction (what AI eng is, vs ML eng, AGI) | M0 |
| How LLMs work (tokens, context, inference) | M0 (builder's depth; not transformer internals) |
| Models & selection (closed/open, families) | M0 + M4/M6 |
| Using model APIs (messages, structured outputs) | M4, M6 |
| Prompt engineering (few-shot, CoT) | M5 |
| AI safety & ethics (bias, moderation, adversarial) | M10 (security) + planned Ethics module |
| Open-source & local models (HF, Ollama) | planned (M3 PyTorch box only today) |
| Embeddings | M7 |
| Vector databases (Chroma, FAISS…) | M7 (Chroma; others surveyed) |
| RAG (chunking, retrieval, re-ranking) | M7-M8 |
| AI agents (function calling, frameworks) | M9 (LangGraph deep; rest surveyed) |
| MCP (client/server) | M9 (surveyed; not built) |
| Multimodal AI (image/audio/vision) | planned (this run) |
| Classic NLP tasks | woven into M5/M6 examples |
| Evaluation, optimization & monitoring | M8 (RAG eval), M11 (monitoring) |
| Fine-tuning & training | out of scope by design (we use hosted models) |
| Data & integrations (SQL, web search) | light / out of scope |
This course is deliberately the applied, beginner path: it doesn't mirror the roadmap node-for-node (that's a reference map, not a curriculum), but it covers the core build skills and points to the roadmap for breadth.