I'm Pratik — a Mechanical Engineering graduate who somehow ended up building RAG pipelines, deploying quantized LLMs on AWS, and shipping AI-native products for real clients. No CS degree. No formal AI training. Just a lot of curiosity, broken prototypes, and late nights figuring out why the model keeps hallucinating. Over the past 2 years I've worked with LangChain, Qdrant, Mistral 7B, LLaMA, OpenAI, and built everything from RAG chatbots to agentic JSON mapping engines to legal AI platforms. This blog is where I document what I actually learn — not textbook theory, but real decisions, real mistakes, and what finally worked. If you're somewhere on the same journey, I hope something here saves you a few hours.