A friend messaged me last month, three weeks into "learning AI" and a little proud of himself. He could explain self-attention. He'd watched the whole video series. Then he asked why his script kept returning the model's answer wrapped in a paragraph of apology instead of the JSON he'd asked for.
That's the gap I want to talk about. He'd learned the engine and never learned to drive.
I won't pretend there's one correct path here. But after watching a lot of people start, and pulling a few of them out of the ditch, I've got opinions about the order you should do things in. So here they are.
Start with the raw API, not a framework
The first move most beginners make is installing LangChain. I'd wait.
