I just launched my 60th course as a

2025-12-01

I just launched my 60th course as a Pluralsight author. And I honestly believe this might be the most important one for developers right now in the library. It’s called “Core Concepts of Generative AI for Developers” and it exists for a simple reason: too many of us are wiring LLMs into real systems while still treating them as mysterious black boxes. Over the last few years we jumped from “this chatbot is fun” to “this model is helping me write production code, summarize sensitive documents, and power new products.” That’s a big leap. In the course, I focus on giving you what I call the three Cs when working with Gen AI: control, confidence, and clarity. We start with the foundations:

  • How transformers actually work (self-attention, positional encoding, and why they scale so well).
  • Why modern innovations like FlashAttention, Grouped-Query Attention, and Mixture of Experts matter for speed, cost, and context windows.
  • What “next-token prediction” really means, and why LLMs simulate reasoning instead of “thinking” like humans. Then we move into how you work with these systems every day:
  • Prompting patterns (zero-shot, few-shot, system prompts, chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought) and why structure matters so much.
  • The main modalities developers care about: text, code, and image/video models, plus truly multimodal systems.
  • How to choose between specialized models, multimodal models, and when to adapt a model with techniques like LoRA and other PEFT approaches. Finally, we look at Gen AI as systems, not just prompts:
  • Tool use and function calling to connect models to the real world.
  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) so your models can answer from your own data reliably.
  • AI agents that can plan, call tools, and collaborate to complete multi-step workflows. My goal with this course is simple: help you move from “I’m playing with Gen AI” to “I know exactly what’s going on under the hood, and I can design systems I trust.” If you’re a developer, architect, or tech lead who wants to build with Gen AI instead of blindly using it, this course is for you. What part of generative AI still feels like a black box to you: transformers, prompting, RAG, or agents? hashtag # generativeai hashtag # ai hashtag # llms hashtag # softwaredevelopment hashtag # developers hashtag # learning hashtag # pluralsight