onestly i was gonna make this an informative post about being an AI engineer at a YC startup with links to books and youtube videos which a lot of y'all would have bookmarked and nobody have come back to it so instead here is something that would actually help
0) build over learn: nobody really has a clue if they are building ai agents the right way or not. everyone is just experiment and figuring things out. my first ai agent ever was a job hunt agent which worked on things like linkedin scrapers and other job page scrapers and gave me a prioritised list of jobs(remote, a good startup)
1) bias to action over everything else: treat tutorials as an excuse. you should not go into tutorials to learn stuff in 2025. go spin up a deep research and start building things which you would want to use. hell even build a job hunt agent yourself. it would teach you a lot, help you in your resume and in your job hunt.
2) those who don't ask, don't get: schools don't teach you this but reaching out to someone is a skill. be succinct. write smaller paragraphs. be on point. be humble and polite but also tacky. write good subject lines. make your pointers shorter.
3) its all a numbers game: if you think you are reaching out to enough number of people a day, double it. no questions asked. and no, don't let ai write your emails. do it yourself. put in the work. there are no shortcuts.
4) put in the work: you can easily get into the top 10% of ai engineers in a couple of months. head down and build(not learn).
this is not a hack. there are no hacks. there are things that have worked for people and this was mine. hope you find it useful and keeep goingggggggggg