About the Author

Photo of Michael Borck, the author

Photo of Michael Borck

Michael Borck is a software developer and educator working at the intersection of human expertise and artificial intelligence. He teaches applied AI and AI in business at Curtin University, and runs The Human Edge masterclasses through Curtin Executive Education. Build AI, Understand AI grew out of a simple classroom observation: students could use AI tools fluently long before they could say what those tools were doing, and the gap closed fastest when they built a tiny version themselves.

His earlier book, Conversation, Not Delegation, argues for treating AI as a thinking partner you converse with. Speak Software teaches readers to direct agents without writing code. This book opens the box those agents are built on: every chapter reduces one familiar AI system to a single model call wrapped in plain Python, built in miniature so it can be read in one sitting. The doing lives in the companion package, hands-on-ai (pip install hands-on-ai), whose modules, documentation and project guides this book narrates; neither duplicates the other.

The bet underneath the book is that models change every few months and the ideas underneath them change slowly. A reader who has built chat, retrieval, an agent loop, a workflow and a judge by hand stops being fooled by demos, whatever the next model is called. Michael builds educational software and resources, and writes about the 80/20 principle in learning and professional judgement.

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Other Books in This Series

Python Track:

AI-Collaboration and Judgement Track:

Web Track: