From never having coded, took 6 months, part-time, after-hours.
As of April 2024:
(1) Learn Python. Helsinki MOOC. (2) Sign up for LLM API. Free trials and free credits everywhere. (3) Read LlamaIndex docs, build RAG over your own documents. (4) Rewrite most of the Llamaindex modules in your own code. (5) Make a demo of something which doesn't yet exist in the market. It'll be sloppy, but it'll be new. (6) Make it less sloppy. (7) For the frontend, use templates and simple protoyping libraries. Learn frontend properly as you go along. (8) Follow AI founders, academics, VCs on twitter so you know what's the frontier.
Just glue together API calls and when you get stuck ask an LLM, "waht does this code do?"