Tools Glossary

A comprehensive reference of all tools covered in the TDS course.

Development Tools

Tool	Category	Description	Week
VS Code	Editor	Code editor with extensions and devcontainers	1
uv	Package Manager	Fast Python package manager replacing pip	1
Git	Version Control	Distributed version control system	1
GitHub	Platform	Code hosting, PRs, Actions, Pages	1
SQLite	Database	Embedded SQL database	1
Bash	Shell	Command-line scripting	1
GitHub Pages	Hosting	Static site hosting from repos	1
jq	CLI	JSON processor for the command line	1
Bruno	API Client	Open-source API client (Postman alternative)	1
GitHub CLI	CLI	gh command for PR/issue automation	1

Deployment & Infrastructure

Tool	Category	Description	Week
Docker	Containers	Application containerization	2
FastAPI	Framework	Modern async Python web framework	2
Vercel	Hosting	Serverless deployment platform	2
Render	Hosting	Web service hosting with free tier	2
HuggingFace Spaces	Hosting	ML model demo hosting (Gradio/Streamlit)	2
Cloudflare Tunnel	Networking	Secure tunneling for local services	2
Google Auth	Security	OAuth2 authentication	2
Pydantic v2	Validation	Data validation with type hints	2

AI & LLM

Tool	Category	Description	Week
OpenAI API	LLM	GPT-4, GPT-3.5, embeddings API	3
Anthropic API	LLM	Claude models	3
llm CLI	CLI	Command-line interface for LLMs	3
Ollama	Local LLM	Run LLMs locally	3
Instructor	Library	Structured LLM output with Pydantic	3
Outlines	Library	Guaranteed structured generation	3

RAG & Search

Tool	Category	Description	Week
Chroma	Vector DB	Open-source embedding database	4
FAISS	Vector DB	Facebook's similarity search library	4
PGVector	Vector DB	PostgreSQL vector extension	4
Qdrant	Vector DB	Production vector search engine	4
RAGAS	Evaluation	RAG quality evaluation framework	4
Cohere Rerank	Re-ranking	Document re-ranking API	4
BM25	Search	Sparse retrieval algorithm	4
BERTopic	Analysis	Topic modeling with transformers	4

Agentic AI

Tool	Category	Description	Week
Pydantic AI	Framework	Type-safe AI agent framework	5
MCP	Protocol	Model Context Protocol for tools	5
FastMCP	Library	Build MCP servers in Python	5
LangGraph	Framework	Stateful multi-agent workflows	5
Tavily	Search	Web search API for agents	5

Vision & Media

Tool	Category	Description	Week
GPT-4o Vision	Vision	Multimodal image understanding	6
Gemini Flash/Pro	Vision	Google's multimodal models	6
Grounding DINO	Detection	Open-vocabulary object detection	6
Whisper	Audio	Speech-to-text transcription	6
OpenCV	Image	Computer vision library	6
SDXL/FLUX	Generation	Image generation models	6

Finetuning & Training

Tool	Category	Description	Week
Unsloth	Training	Fast LLM finetuning library	7
PEFT	Training	Parameter-efficient finetuning	7
HuggingFace Hub	Platform	Model and dataset hosting	7
TRL	Training	Transformer Reinforcement Learning	7
LM Eval Harness	Evaluation	Standardized LLM benchmarking	7

CI/CD & Security

Tool	Category	Description	Week
GitHub Actions	CI/CD	Automated workflow pipelines	8
NeMo Guardrails	Safety	LLM output filtering and rails	8
Trivy	Security	Container vulnerability scanner	8
Docker Scout	Security	Image vulnerability scanning	8

Cloud (GCP)

Tool	Category	Description	Week
Cloud Run	Compute	Managed container platform	9-10
BigQuery	Data	Serverless data warehouse + ML	9-10
Vertex AI	ML	Managed ML platform	9-10
Cloud Storage	Storage	Object/blob storage	9-10
Cloud Functions	Compute	Serverless event-driven functions	9-10
MLflow	MLOps	Experiment tracking and registry	9
DVC	MLOps	Data version control	9
Pub/Sub	Messaging	Event-driven messaging	10
Artifact Registry	Storage	Private Docker image registry	10
Cloud Logging	Monitoring	Centralized log management	10
Secret Manager	Security	Secure API key storage	10