Time-boxed path
Learn AI Basics Free in 30 Days
You can get genuinely literate about modern AI in 30 days without writing much code at all. This plan is 23 hours of short, focused courses, so under an hour a day. You start with what generative AI and large language models actually are, move into prompt engineering from the people who build these models (Google and Anthropic), and finish with a look at AI agents. The goal is understanding, not model training: you leave able to use these tools well and talk about them accurately.
The daily math
This plan is 23 hours of free courses spread across 30 days. That works out to about 0.8 hours a day, or roughly 5.4 hours a week if you prefer to batch it. Miss a day and you make it up on the weekend; the point is a pace you can actually keep.
The plan, course by course
Why this set, and what we left out
This is a conceptual and prompting plan, not a machine-learning plan. We deliberately kept out heavy courses like fast.ai and CS50 AI, which require real Python and math and belong in the 6-month AI engineer track. The picks here are short by design and come straight from the model builders, so you learn prompting from Anthropic and LLM basics from Google rather than second-hand summaries. If you only want the prompting skill and not the broader agent tour, the tighter /learn-in/30-days/prompt-engineering plan is the same courses minus the agents piece, focused on writing better prompts.
The honest catch
This makes you AI-literate, not an AI engineer. You will understand and use LLMs well, but you will not train models or build production AI systems. For that, you need Python, math, and the 6-month AI engineer plan.