Python Mastery for AI Data Processing
Python as the lingua franca of AI libs: type hints and Pydantic-shaped payloads, functions and imports, resilient JSON I/O, venv plus lockfiles, streaming patterns for JSONL — then consolidate with the CLI expense tracker.
Step 1 · concept
Why Python for AI engineering
Major SDKs and frameworks are Python-first or Python-native: OpenAI/Hugging Face/LangChain-style stacks, PyTorch, FastAPI services, notebooks for experiments. You do not need to memorize the entire language; you need to read docs, adapt examples, and debug real pipelines.
The through-line for this lesson: data in (config, HTTP JSON, files) → your logic → data out — same shape as the LLM apps you will build later in this curriculum.
BPE (Byte Pair Encoding)