<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"><channel>
  <title>Learn AI in 100 Days — Varun Vemulapalli</title>
  <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/</link>
  <description>AI explained one idea a day, in plain English, with real examples from banking, insurance, healthcare and retail. No PhD required.</description>
  <language>en</language>
  <item>
    <title>Day 100: Reflection: 100 days later, and what&#x27;s next</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-100.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-100.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 09 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>You started with &quot;what is AI?&quot; and finished able to design, build, test and ship an agent responsibly.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 99: Your roadmap after 100 days</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-99.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-99.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 08 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Pick one real problem and give it 90 days: use it safely, build it, then ship it and show it.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 98: Responsible AI: bias, privacy and regulation</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-98.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-98.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 07 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Test outcomes by group, send only the data you need, and know which rules apply before you launch.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 97: Agents at work: real use cases in banking, insurance and healthcare</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-97.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-97.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 06 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Agents at work do the legwork around a decision (gather, check, draft, log) while a person keeps the decision.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 96: Showcase it: README, demo video and GitHub portfolio</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-96.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-96.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A one-line README, a 90-second demo and a pinned repo turn your agent into proof anyone can check in 2 minutes.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 95: Collecting feedback and iterating</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-95.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-95.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 04 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Log every approval, edit and thumbs-down, fix the biggest bucket one change at a time, and turn each failure into a new eval case.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 94: Deploying and sharing your agent</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-94.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-94.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 03 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Share your agent one rung at a time, from your laptop to a teammate to a small private web app, and hand the organization-wide version to IT.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 93: Security and responsible-AI checklist</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-93.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-93.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 02 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Treat every transcript as untrusted data, give tools the least power they need, mask PII, and keep a human approval before anything is created or sent.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 92: Cost, latency and monitoring</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-92.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-92.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 01 Jan 2027 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Log every run to know cost, seconds and errors per run; resent input tokens are usually the biggest lever.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 91: Testing and evals: how to know it works</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-91.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-91.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 31 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An eval is a fixed exam of inputs and golden answers that turns &quot;it seems to work&quot; into a score you rerun after every change.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 90: Adding knowledge (RAG and knowledge sources)</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-90.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-90.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 30 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Give your agent the team&#x27;s glossary and owner directory, in the prompt while small, through retrieval when large, and keep both up to date.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 89: Adding tools and actions</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-89.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-89.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 29 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Give your agent reading tools freely, but put every action behind an approval gate your code enforces.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 88: Building the core agent loop</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-88.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-88.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>The agent loop is plain code: call the model, run the tool it asks for, send back the result, and stop when it&#x27;s done or hits your limit.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 87: Writing the spec and system prompt</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-87.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-87.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 27 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Write the spec for humans first, then translate it into a system prompt with a role, clear rules, tags and an example.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 86: Designing your agent: use case, users, scope, success criteria</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-86.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-86.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 26 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Design an agent like a product: name the job, the users, the boundaries and the test for &quot;done&quot; before you write code.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 85: Choosing the right tool: Claude, Copilot Studio, Codex or GitHub Copilot</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-85.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-85.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 25 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Pick the tool by who builds it, where users work, what it produces and what it must connect to, not by which demo looked best.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 84: Hands-on: build an HR-policy agent in Copilot Studio</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-84.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-84.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A good policy agent answers from the documents, cites them, and hands personal cases to a human.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 83: Security, governance and admin controls</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-83.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-83.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 23 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Environments, data policies, sign-in and audit logs let a company say yes to agent builders without losing control of its data.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 82: Publishing to Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot and websites</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-82.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-82.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 22 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Publish, pick channels where people already work, set authentication on purpose, and roll out from pilot to org with admin approval.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 81: Autonomous agents and event triggers</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-81.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-81.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Event triggers let an agent start itself, so keep instructions precise, credentials in mind and a person on final decisions.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 80: Actions: connectors, Power Automate flows and APIs</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-80.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-80.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 20 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A tool, like an agent flow with clear inputs and outputs, turns your agent from an answerer into a doer.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 79: Topics, triggers and conversation design</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-79.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-79.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 19 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Topics give high-stakes conversations fixed, tested steps, while generative orchestration decides when to use them.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 78: Your first agent: instructions and knowledge sources</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-78.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-78.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 18 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Clear instructions plus well-described knowledge turn a long manual into an agent that answers with citations.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 77: What Copilot Studio is: low-code agents for Microsoft 365</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-77.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-77.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 17 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Copilot Studio lets you assemble an agent from instructions, knowledge, tools, topics and triggers, and publish it where colleagues already work.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 76: Recap of Days 55–75: comparing the coding agents</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-76.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-76.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Copilot, Codex and Claude Code share the same core skills; pick by where your work happens and keep a human reviewing every change.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 75: Hands-on: Claude Code builds an agent end to end</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-75.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-75.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 15 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Describe the agent, review the plan, and let Claude Code build, test and run it, while you keep the approvals and the final decisions.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 74: Subagents, hooks and permissions</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-74.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-74.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 14 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Subagents split the work, hooks make steps automatic, and permission rules set hard limits that the model can&#x27;t talk its way past.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 73: Build a research agent with the Claude Agent SDK</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-73.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-73.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 13 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A research agent is the Agent SDK loop with search, read and write tools plus clear rules, and its brief is only as good as the citations you check.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 72: The Claude Agent SDK: what it is and when to use it</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-72.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-72.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 12 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Use the API for single calls, Claude Code for hands-on work, and the Agent SDK when your own program needs an agent that reads, acts and loops without you.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 71: Connecting Claude to your tools with MCP servers</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-71.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-71.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>MCP servers give Claude a menu of tools for your systems, added with one command in Claude Code or as a connector in claude.ai.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 70: Steering Claude Code: CLAUDE.md, slash commands and skills</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-70.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-70.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 10 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>CLAUDE.md holds what Claude should always know, slash commands steer a session, and skills package a repeatable job your whole team can run by name.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 69: Claude Code: setup and your first session</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-69.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-69.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 09 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Claude Code is an agent in your terminal or editor that reads, runs and edits your project; give it clear expected-vs-actual and review every change.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 68: Tool use with the Claude API</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-68.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-68.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>With tool use, Claude asks for a function call in JSON, your code runs it and returns a matching tool_result, and the answer is grounded in real data.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 67: Your first Claude API call</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-67.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-67.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A Claude API call is a model, a length limit and your messages, sent with a secret key, turning raw text into next steps from your own code.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 66: Claude for builders: models, Projects and artifacts</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-66.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-66.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 06 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Pick a model for the job, put the context in a Project once, and let artifacts turn chats into things you can click, share and reuse.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 65: Hands-on: have Codex build and test a feature</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-65.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-65.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 05 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>You write the spec and the tricky example; Codex plans, builds, tests and reviews; you approve the commit.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 64: Codex for tests, refactoring and code review</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-64.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-64.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Have Codex write tests first, refactor second and review third, and keep a human as the final approver.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 63: Guiding Codex with AGENTS.md</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-63.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-63.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 03 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>AGENTS.md is the onboarding note for your coding agent: short, specific rules in the repo, loaded before every task.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 62: Setting up Codex and your first task</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-62.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-62.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 02 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Install Codex, sign in with ChatGPT, commit a checkpoint, and start with one failing test you can verify yourself.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 61: What Codex is: CLI, IDE and cloud agent</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-61.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-61.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 01 Dec 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Codex is one coding agent you can use from the terminal, your editor, the ChatGPT app or the cloud, and a safe first job is asking it to explain code…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 60: Hands-on: build a small working tool with GitHub Copilot</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-60.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-60.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Clear rules, worked numbers and tests turn Copilot into a reliable builder, and you into the checker.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 59: Custom instructions and MCP servers in Copilot</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-59.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-59.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 29 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An instructions file tells Copilot your project&#x27;s rules, and MCP servers give it new tools.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 58: Copilot coding agent: assign an issue, get a pull request</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-58.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-58.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 28 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Assign a clear issue to Copilot cloud agent and it returns a pull request, but a human still reviews and merges.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 57: Agent mode in VS Code: Copilot editing across files</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-57.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-57.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 27 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>In Agent, Copilot plans and edits across files, and your job becomes clear criteria and careful review.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 56: Code completions and Copilot Chat</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-56.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-56.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 26 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Completions finish the line you&#x27;re writing; Chat explains, questions and tests it, and you check both.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 55: What GitHub Copilot is, plans and setup in VS Code</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-55.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-55.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 25 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>GitHub Copilot is an AI assistant in your editor, and the free plan plus VS Code is all you need to start.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 54: Recap of Days 47–53</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-54.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-54.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 24 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Terminal, Git, Python, APIs, secrets, docs and one LLM call make up the builder&#x27;s loop that coding agents will now run with you.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 53: Your first API call to an LLM</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-53.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-53.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 23 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An LLM API call is a POST with a model and a prompt; ask for JSON and the answer can feed your code.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 52: How to read developer docs quickly</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-52.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-52.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 22 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Read docs on a fixed path (quickstart, auth, one endpoint, errors, rate limits) and skip the rest until you need it.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 51: API keys, environment variables and keeping secrets safe</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-51.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-51.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 21 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Keep keys in environment variables, keep .env out of Git, and if a key leaks, revoke it first and clean up second.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 50: APIs and JSON explained</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-50.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-50.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 20 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An API is a waiter between programs: you send a request to a URL with a method, and get back a status code and a JSON body you can read key by key.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 49: Python essentials for building agents</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-49.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-49.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 19 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Variables, lists, dicts, loops, functions and packages are enough to read data and build the small tools agents rely on.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 48: Git and GitHub basics</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-48.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-48.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 18 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Commits are save points, branches are safe copies, and pull requests are reviewed merges, so a team (or an AI agent) can change shared files without chaos.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 47: Your setup: VS Code and the terminal</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-47.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-47.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 17 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>The terminal is a precise text conversation with your computer, and five safe commands are enough to find your way around and set up your workspace.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 46: Recap of Days 35–45 + which tool for which job</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-46.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-46.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 16 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Agents think, act and observe with tools, under guardrails and human checkpoints. From tomorrow, we build.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 45: Guardrails and prompt injection</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-45.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-45.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 15 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Anything an AI reads can try to give it orders, so treat content as data, check inputs and outputs, limit what the AI can do, and keep a human on…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 44: Human-in-the-loop</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-44.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-44.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 14 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Human-in-the-loop lets agents handle routine cases on their own and pause for a person on high-stakes ones, with every decision logged.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 43: Multi-agent systems and subagents</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-43.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-43.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Multi-agent systems give each part of a big job its own clean context, which helps on wide research but adds cost, so use them only when the work truly…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 42: Agent patterns</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-42.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-42.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 12 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Chaining, routing, parallel and orchestrator–workers are building blocks; pick the simplest one that fits the work.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 41: MCP (Model Context Protocol)</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-41.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-41.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 11 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>MCP is a shared standard that lets any compatible AI app plug into tools and data through servers, so you build each connection once, not once per app.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 40: Planning and multi-step tasks</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-40.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-40.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 10 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Good agents break a goal into ordered steps, respect what depends on what, and re-plan out loud when something goes missing.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 39: Memory and state</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-39.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-39.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Models don&#x27;t remember; apps give agents memory by saving the right facts and task state and feeding them back in, and deciding what not to store…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 38: Designing good tools for an agent</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-38.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-38.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Give an agent small, clearly named tools with typed inputs, helpful errors and only the access each job needs, and it will guess less and break less.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 37: Tool use / function calling</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-37.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-37.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>With tool use, the model decides which function to call and with what inputs, and your app runs it and returns the result, so answers come from real…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 36: The agent loop</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-36.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-36.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An agent is a loop of think, act, observe, repeat, and the stopping conditions you give it matter as much as the goal.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 35: Chatbot vs workflow vs agent</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-35.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-35.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Use a chatbot to answer, a workflow when the steps are known, and an agent only when the steps depend on what it discovers along the way.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 34: Recap of Days 29–33</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-34.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-34.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Phase 4 done. You now know how to give an AI model knowledge it was never trained on, and how to pick the model in the first place.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 33: Open vs closed models, and how to choose one</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-33.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-33.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Open-weight models give you control but you run them; closed models give you ease but you trust a provider, so test both on your own task, cost and…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 32: Chunking and retrieval quality</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-32.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-32.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Good RAG starts with good chunks: split by structure, keep tables whole, add overlap and metadata, and test retrieval with real questions.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 31: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-31.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-31.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 01 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>RAG retrieves the right passages from your own documents and gives them to the model, so answers are grounded, current and traceable to a source.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 30: Vector databases</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-30.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-30.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 31 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A vector database stores embeddings with their metadata and quickly finds the closest matches by meaning, which is what makes semantic search work at…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 29: Semantic search</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-29.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-29.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Semantic search compares meanings as embeddings, so it finds the right answer even when the user&#x27;s words don&#x27;t match the document&#x27;s.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 28: Recap of Days 15–27</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-28.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-28.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An LLM predicts the next token from patterns; clear prompts, real sources and structured output make it reliable at work.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 27: Multimodal AI</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-27.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-27.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Multimodal AI reads images, audio and text together, which makes intake faster and richer, but a human still checks what the model thinks it sees.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 26: Structured outputs: JSON</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-26.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-26.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Define a schema, ask the model for JSON that matches it, and validate every result, so AI output can flow into real systems instead of being copied by…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 25: System prompts and roles</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-25.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-25.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>The system prompt sets who the assistant is and the rules it follows, the user message is the request, and the assistant reply should follow both, with…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 24: Few-shot prompting and step-by-step reasoning</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-24.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-24.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 25 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Show the model a few labeled examples to get consistent answers in your format, and ask it to reason step by step when the task has math or multiple steps.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 23: Prompt engineering basics</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-23.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-23.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 24 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Give the model a role, a clear task, the context, the format you want and the rules to follow, and a vague answer becomes a usable one.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 22: Hallucinations</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-22.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-22.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>LLMs predict plausible text rather than look things up, so give them the source, ask them to cite it, let them say &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot;, and verify anything…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 21: Temperature and sampling</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-21.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-21.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Temperature decides how adventurous the model is when picking each next word: turn it up for ideas, down for answers that must stay consistent.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 20: Context windows</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-20.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-20.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>The context window is the model&#x27;s working memory in tokens; when you overfill it, things get cut or ignored, so send only what matters.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 19: Fine-tuning and RLHF</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-19.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-19.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Fine-tuning teaches a model your format from approved examples, and RLHF teaches it what people prefer by learning from their choices between answers.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 18: How LLMs are pretrained</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-18.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-18.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Pretraining teaches a model language, facts and patterns through billions of next-word guesses, but it stops at a cutoff date and isn&#x27;t an assistant yet.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 17: Transformers and attention</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-17.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-17.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Transformers use attention so every word can look at every other word at once, which is how AI understands words in context.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 16: Tokens</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-16.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-16.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>LLMs read text as tokens (about ¾ of a word each in English), and tokens drive both your bill and your limits.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 15: What is generative AI?</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-15.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-15.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Classic AI picks from options it was given, while generative AI creates new content by predicting the next word, over and over.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 14: Recap and quiz: Days 1–13</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-14.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-14.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Two weeks in. If you&#x27;ve followed along, you now understand more about how AI works than many people who use it every day.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 13: Transfer learning and GPUs</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-13.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-13.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Transfer learning reuses what a big model already learned so you need far less data, and GPUs make the heavy number-crunching fast by doing it in parallel.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 12: How AI sees images</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-12.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-12.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>AI sees an image as a grid of numbers and builds up from edges to shapes to objects, layer by layer, using filters it learned from labeled examples.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 11: Embeddings</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-11.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-11.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>An embedding turns meaning into a list of numbers, so similar things land close together and AI can measure similarity with simple math.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 10: Loss, gradient descent and backpropagation</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-10.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-10.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A network learns by measuring how wrong it is (loss), working out each weights share of the blame (backpropagation) and nudging every weight downhill…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 9: Neurons and neural networks</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-09.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-09.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A neuron multiplies inputs by learned weights, adds them up and decides; stack enough of them in layers and you get a neural network.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 8: Overfitting</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-08.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-08.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Overfitting is when a model memorizes its training data instead of learning the pattern, so it looks great in practice and fails on anything new.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 7: Accuracy, precision and recall</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-07.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-07.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Accuracy says how often a model is right overall; precision says how much to trust its alarms; recall says how many real problems it catches.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 6: Supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-06.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-06.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Supervised learns from answers, unsupervised finds patterns without answers, and reinforcement learns from rewards for its own actions.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 5: Training vs inference</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-05.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-05.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Training is the slow, expensive learning done ahead of time; inference is the fast answer the frozen model gives every time you use it.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 4: Data, features and labels</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-04.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-04.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>Data is the past examples, features are the clues, labels are the answers, and a model is only as good as all three.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 3: How machines learn from examples</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-03.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-03.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>A machine &quot;learns&quot; by guessing, measuring how wrong it was on examples with known answers, and adjusting, over and over, until its guesses get good.</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 2: AI vs machine learning vs deep learning vs generative AI</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-02.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-02.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>AI is the umbrella, Machine Learning learns from examples, Deep Learning does it with many-layered neural networks, and Generative AI uses that to…</description>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>Day 1: What is AI?</title>
    <link>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-01.html</link>
    <guid>https://varunvemulapalli.com/blog/day-01.html</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description>AI is software that learns patterns from examples so it can recognize, predict or decide on situations it hasn&#x27;t seen before.</description>
  </item>
</channel></rss>
