5 AI Projects You Can Build This Weekend (with Python)

From beginner-friendly to advanced

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The best way to develop your AI skills is by building projects. However, figuring out what to build can be difficult if you're just getting started. Here, I share 5 AI projects you can build fast at three levels of sophistication. I’ll break down the steps and Python libraries needed to implement each idea.

The number one mistake beginners make when thinking of project ideas is starting with the question, "How can I use this new tech?" While this can be a fine way to learn a new tool, there is a better way.

Good project ideas start with the question, “What problem can I solve?” This not only makes for a nice story when sharing with potential employers but solving problems is how you translate technical skills into value.

The following projects all take this problem-first approach. You can take these ideas and implement them directly or (even better) use them as inspiration for solving a problem that you are personally facing.

1) Resume Optimization (Beginner)

An effective yet time-consuming part of applying for jobs is adapting your resume to different job descriptions. While automating this task would have been an advanced project a few years ago, with today’s large language models, it is as simple as an API call.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to implement such an automation.

1. Create a markdown version of your resume (Note: ChatGPT can do this for you).
2. Experiment with different prompt templates that take your markdown resume and a job description and output a new resume in markdown.
3. Use OpenAI’s Python API to prompt GPT-4o-mini to rewrite your resume dynamically.
4. Convert the markdown file to HTML and then to PDF with the markdown and pdfkit libraries, respectively.