Skip the degree: a 10-repo GitHub roadmap to land a $200K AI engineer job in 90 days
mdancho84 · x · 2026-09-08
Educator Matt Dancho argues aspiring AI engineers should build proof-of-work instead of getting a degree, and lays out 10 GitHub repos as a roadmap:
- awesome-llm-apps (106K+ stars): production RAG, agent, and multimodal app code
- LangChain: the foundational framework, used in production by Klarna, Replit, Elastic and most AI startups
- LangGraph: the agent orchestration layer appearing in senior AI engineer job descriptions
- CrewAI: multi-agent coordination, a Fortune 500 favorite
- Ollama: run open-source LLMs locally to learn how models actually work
- plus awesome-mcp-servers and more (post truncated)
The core thesis: a portfolio of working repos beats credentials.
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