---
title: "The Free AI Engineering Degree Hiding on GitHub — 12 Courses, 802,000 Stars, the Exact Order"
source_url: https://youtu.be/xk3HgsTPOZM
captured_at: 2026-08-21
author: "Hyperautomation Labs"
contributor: "ชิดชนก"
platform: youtube
---
# The Free AI Engineering Degree Hiding on GitHub — 12 Courses, 802,000 Stars, the Exact Order

youtube video by **Hyperautomation Labs**, 8m27s, uploaded 2026-08-20. URL: https://youtu.be/xk3HgsTPOZM
Tags: ai agents, ai engineering roadmap, ai for beginners, ai roadmap 2026, awesome llm apps, claude cookbooks, free ai courses, free ai degree, generative ai for beginners, github repos, hugging face agents course, karpathy, learn ai engineering, learn ai free, llms from scratch, nanochat, openai cookbook, prompt engineering guide

## Shared in LINE Note+
- 2026-08-21 11:28 by ชิดชนก

## Description
Twelve free GitHub course repos carry 802,495 stars between them — together they cover every skill an AI engineer gets paid for in 2026. The problem: open them in the wrong order and you stall by week two, because three of them are graduate-level hard. So I opened all twelve in one day, pulled every star count and last-commit date live from the GitHub API, audited what's actually inside each one (lesson and notebook counts, not vibes), and mapped the exact 6-level order — including a live, uncut run where I clone one starter agent and have a working AI app answering data questions in minutes.

📄 FREE: The AI Curriculum Starmap — all 12 repos with the 6-level order, the entry lesson for each, honest freshness flags, the three skip flags, and a first-3-weeks plan that gets you a running app in week one. Comment the word STARMAP and I'll send it to you.

WHAT'S COVERED (every number pulled from the GitHub API on Aug 20, 2026):
• The trap: starring ≠ starting — and why star counts measure discovery, not teaching quality
• Level 1 — microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners (118,196★): 21 lessons, 9 of them build lessons — and why you start at lesson 04, not lesson 01
• Level 2 — dair-ai/Pr