12 hand-picked projects with step-by-step guidance, real tools, and honest time estimates. Each project is designed to be portfolio-worthy and job-relevant.
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LLM that ranks resumes against job descriptions
Build a tool that takes a job description and a batch of resumes and outputs a ranked shortlist with reasoning. Uses LLM-based structured extraction and scoring.
Why this project
Portfolio-ready tool recruiters actually want
Transcribe audio and produce structured summaries
Use Whisper to transcribe audio, then an LLM to extract key points, chapters, and a one-paragraph TL;DR. Add a web UI for drag-and-drop uploads.
Why this project
Real-world audio AI pipeline in 6 hours
RAG over your own document library
Build a semantic search system over PDFs or Notion pages. Embed documents into a vector store, then retrieve + rerank relevant chunks and generate grounded answers.
Why this project
Production-ready RAG system — directly hirable skill
Classify sentiment from tweets in 10+ languages
Stream Twitter/X data, run multilingual sentiment classification using a fine-tuned XLM-R model, and visualize trends in a live dashboard.
Why this project
Shows you can work with real-time data at scale
Webcam inference with YOLOv8 in the browser
Run YOLOv8 on live webcam feed in the browser using ONNX Runtime Web. No server required — pure client-side ML inference.
Why this project
Impressive live demo — perfect for interviews
Fine-tune ResNet on chest X-rays
Fine-tune a ResNet50 on the NIH Chest X-Ray dataset to classify 14 pathologies. Implement Grad-CAM for explainability.
Why this project
High-impact domain AI — stands out in healthcare roles
Restore old and damaged photos with diffusion
Use a combination of inpainting diffusion models and super-resolution to restore scratched or faded photos. Build a simple web UI around it.
Why this project
Viral-worthy output — great for showing on social
Critique and rewrite text in different styles
Build a writing assistant that analyzes text for clarity, tone, and grammar — then rewrites it in the user's target style (formal, casual, persuasive). Stream outputs.
Why this project
Deployable in a day — real users, real usage
Build an agent that can search, code, and browse
Create a LangGraph or CrewAI agent with tools: web search, code execution, and file read/write. Give it a task like 'research X and write a report' — watch it plan and execute.
Why this project
Agents are the hottest skill in 2026 AI hiring
Chat with your Notion, Obsidian, or PDF notes
Connect your personal notes, sync them into a vector database, and build a conversational interface that retrieves relevant context and answers questions grounded in your knowledge.
Why this project
Genuinely useful product you will use daily
Track model drift, latency, and error rates
Deploy a model and wrap it with a monitoring layer that tracks prediction distribution drift, latency percentiles, and error rates. Trigger alerts when drift exceeds a threshold.
Why this project
MLOps is the #1 gap in most ML engineers' portfolios
Fine-tune a 7B LLM on custom data in an hour
Use QLoRA to fine-tune Llama 3 8B on a custom instruction-following dataset. Push to HuggingFace Hub and deploy via Ollama for local inference.
Why this project
Fine-tuning skill is rare and extremely well-paid
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