From never having coded, takes 6 months, part-time, after-hours, to become proficient in coding a RAG backend.
As of April 2024:
(1) Learn Python. Helsinki MOOC.
(2) Sign up for any 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 devs, founders, academics, and VCs on x/twitter so you know what's the frontier.
When you don't understand something, ask an llm, "whta does this do?", "why error?", etc. Everyone has, for free, an infinitely patient private tutor.