I Built 10 AI Applications in 5 Days as a Beginner — Here's What Actually Happened

Short summary

Developer completing IBM's Applied AI Developer Professional Certificate builds 10 guided projects in 5 days, from backend basics to RAG applications. Practical building reveals critical gaps: LangChain version conflicts, BlenderBot quality issues, and deployment challenges that passive learning hides. Next phase is independent building to validate whether guided coursework actually stuck versus rote memorization.

• •Built 10 projects across Flask, LangChain, Whisper, Piper, and RAG—progressing from simple APIs to retrieval-augmented generation
• •Real obstacles exposed (version mismatches, model quality problems, API inaccessibility) that course materials didn't prepare for
• •Core realization: independent building without guides is the true test of learning; guided coursework alone is incomplete

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.