Good project ideas to do alongside an apprenticeship
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Hi everyone, I just started an apprenticeship where I'm using Microsoft's Power Automate, Copilot studio and Service Now. However, this mean's there's very minimal coding involved(we weren't even told to install VScode), so I was looking for some good project ideas in AI/ML to do alongside, to keep my python coding skills intact?
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Try a Python ticket router with synthetic support requests. Compare keyword rules with a classifier on unseen tickets, and leave uncertain cases for a person. You'd practise data cleaning, model evaluation and building an API around a problem close to your apprenticeship.
Build a verification harness for coding agents. An agent refactored a service and reported every test green while a core helper was deleted entirely. The bad code was easy to fix, but being told everything was fine is what broke trust.
Two that kept my Python sharp, both outside work hours: Kaggle-style competitions with real data. I entered the PRC Data Challenge this year (predicting airport taxi-out times) solo, with LightGBM and CatBoost. A leaderboard tells you when you're wrong, and that's hard to get from a side project. Or build an agent that plays something. I run LLMPvP, an arena where AI agents play chess and Go against each other through an API. Writing a bot that calls an LLM, validates its moves, and handles timeouts covers more practical Python than most tutorials