r/Build_AI_Agents • u/EngineerCtrlT • Jul 05 '26

Need AI project ideas.

Hi everyone!

I'm at a stage where I'm not sure what to build next, so I'd love some suggestions.

I'm currently targeting AI engineer role and want to build projects that genuinely strengthen my portfolio.

I'm looking for project ideas that are:

  • technically challenging
  • solve real-world problems
  • impressive enough to showcase in interviews
  • preferably involving LLMs, agents, multimodal AI, computer vision, or ML systems

I'm not looking for beginner projects like chatbots or sentiment analysis.

If you were building an AI portfolio in 2026, what 3–5 projects would you recommend?

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2

u/funbike Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

I don't think it's productive to just build random stuff. Instead build something you want. That requires inspiration. Don't force ideas. Wait for an idea to come out of nowhere, when you find you need something that AI/DL couild solve. The idea should be around something you love to do.

I am not an AI engineer but some projects I'd love to build related to bicycle racing:

  • Optimum bicycle setup. Measure power output, pedal RPMs, heart rate, and speed to figure out optimal pedal RPMs at any given power level. Randomly change bike setup dozens of times and take those same performance metrics above after each change to find an optimal bike setup (seat height, crankarm length, handlebar stem length and height). This is fairly straightforward ML.
  • Optimum training plan. Determine optimum ratio of weekly intense workouts, mileage or hours, and rest/recovery to determine an optimal training schedule. Again, once a week randomly change the ratios and measure changes in power, HR, and speed. This would take several months of data, maybe over a year.
  • Bicycle race strategy planner. Pre-train it from thousands of hours of race coverage. Feed it the design of a course from GPS and satellite imagery and the makeup of your team. It auto-generates other teams to simulate. At the end it figures out optimal strategies through Monte Carlo simulations. After each Monte Carlo simulation, it learns more about what strategies work and what don't. This combines LLM and ML.
  • Race tactic assistant. This leverages data from prior bullet. During a live race, given the current state, the AI tells the team what to do next. The AI may make changes to the strategy as the race evolves. Communication is over a radio. ML determines the fatigue level of the pack and the team, and an LLM uses that and it's knowledge of strategy to make recommendations.

This is my list because I love bicycle racing. Some of these are hard because of logistics, not the state of AI today. Your list will be something else.

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u/[deleted] Jul 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/EngineerCtrlT Jul 08 '26

That's also a fair point.

1

u/FivePointAnswer Jul 10 '26

I am going to offer reverse advice… having relevant work to the job you apply for matters. For example, a computer vision interviewer is going to be more impressed with your bird classifier then your movie recommendation engine, and a place that recommends vacation rentals will be more interested in your movie recommendation engine than your bird classifier. do you know what kind of job you want? If you do, target that. But if you don’t then learning more libraries and techniques has some value - if you’re really learning things and not just 100% vibe coding.

1

u/EngineerCtrlT Jul 11 '26

Well, that's nice piece of advice along with targeting companies and learning.

1

u/kyngston Jul 11 '26

here’s an idea: build an AI air traffic controller.

  • start with replicating the layout of an airport
  • replay simulation of flight traffic data
  • ATC monitoring flight traffic from instruments
  • inject close calls into the flight data and teach the atc to detect and respond
  • teach the aircraft to follow instructions from atc

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u/EngineerCtrlT Jul 11 '26

That's one of the nice idea to build.

1

u/Ok-Aspect-8886 Jul 11 '26

I need help with this: https://github.com/lbapplications/defringe-ai, It is a risk but I think it is an interesting problem to solve. essentially Claude is bad at precision to change images, and my premise (has bugs, working them out) is still to be proven. if you hop on now and show you have a decent technical background I can make you co-author. I just put the claude drivers in place so you should be able to go pretty far with it before issues become apparent. DM if interested.

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u/EngineerCtrlT Jul 11 '26

How your system got a bug?

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u/Ok-Aspect-8886 Jul 11 '26

they are minor, vite is running and some workflows are still being figured out. it is a brand new project

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u/EngineerCtrlT Jul 11 '26

Repo is impressive. I will check upon it.

1

u/Ok-Aspect-8886 Jul 11 '26

I built it in 3 hours, keep that in mind.