Andrew Ng: "AI Engineering Skills Map: Building and Deploying AI Applications"

Andrew Ng outlines a comprehensive AI Engineering Skills Map, identifying the core competencies needed to build and deploy AI applications: LLM foundations, grounding models with data, building agentic systems, evaluation-driven development, and operating in production. The key distinction between AI and traditional software engineering is that AI systems produce unpredictable outputs, requiring iterative development processes where engineers repeatedly test, examine results, and adapt their approach. Ng's framework was developed by analyzing job postings, expert interviews, and survey responses to identify the most critical skills in the field.