Dev Environment
Your tools shape your thinking. Set them up once, set them up right. Set up Python 3.11+, Node.js 20+, and Rust toolchains from scratch. Configure virtual environments and package managers for reproducible builds. Verify GPU access with CUDA/MPS and run a test tensor operation. Understand the four-layer stack: system, packages, runtimes, AI libraries. You're about to learn AI engineering across 500+ lessons using Python, TypeScript, Rust, and Julia. If your environment is broken, every single lesson becomes a fight against tooling instead of learning. Most people skip environment setup. Then they spend hours debugging import errors, version conflicts, and missing CUDA drivers. We're going to do this once, properly. An AI engineering environment has four layers: We install bottom-up. Each layer depends on the one below it. Check your system and install the basics. We use uv — it's 10-100x faster than pip and handles virtual environments automatically. Verify: For TypeScript lessons (agents, MCP servers, web apps). macOS / Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4): If the installer stops with Error: Cannot install under Rosetta 2 in ARM default prefix (/opt/homebrew), your terminal is running under Rosetta 2 (arch prints i386) while Homebrew is a native arm64 build. Install fnm forcing arm64, wire it into your shell, then rerun the commands above from fnm install 22: For performance-critical lessons (inference, systems). For math-heavy…
Dev Environment: Your tools shape your thinking. Set them up once, set them up right. Set up Python 3.11+, Node.js 20+, and Rust toolchains from scratch.…
This free lesson is part of the AI Engineering from Scratch curriculum. Read the full explanation, run the lesson code, and verify the result in the interactive reader or from the repository source.
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