My AI starter kit

Thibault Maekelbergh

05 May 2026 • 8 min read

Preread: How this started

At Payflip, we are increasingly embracing agentic coding, AI in our internal operations, and experimenting with AI enabled features in our products. Since blindly purchasing tools or winging it is not a decent strategy, we have formed a core 'AI taskforce' spanning across our sales, engineering, product, and support units.

This core team then identifies opportunities, brings them to the table, and evaluates our overall AI adoption within the company. Not all of our taskforce's members were per se experts in (Gen) AI concepts, but they were definitely enthusiastic about taking ownership around AI in the company and learning how Gen AI truly works.

Over the past few years, I have self-hosted LLMs, developed POCs using techniques like RAG and MCP, and experimented with models from various providers to find the differences. This experimenting has given me a waaaaaay better understanding of how these models function, how you can elevate them, and why certain outputs may not meet expectations, along with clear methods for improving that.

First thing that we started with in the taskforce is my AI starter kit. I compiled some key resources (articles, videos, whitepapers, ...) that really helped me understand, and put them into the AI starter kit. Since I believe items in the kit are both easy to understand & interesting, I wanted to share it here for anyone looking to develop a solid foundation in AI knowledge for either their team or personal learning.