Thanks for sharing! It's inspiring to see more people "reinventing for insight" in the age of AI. This reminds me of my similar previous project a year ago when I built an entire PyTorch-style machine learning library [1] from scratch, using nothing but Python and NumPy. I started with a tiny autograd engine, then gradually created layer modules, optimizers, data loaders etc... I simply wanted to learn machine learning from first principles. Along the way I attempted to reproduce classical convnets [2] all the way to a toy GPT-2 [3] using the library I built. It definitely helped me understand how machine learning worked underneath the hood without all the fancy abstractions that PyTorch/TensorFlow provides. I eventually wrote a blog post [4] of this journey.
[1] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand
[2] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand/blob/main/examples/c...
[3] https://github.com/workofart/ml-by-hand/blob/main/examples/g...
[4] https://www.henrypan.com/blog/2025-02-06-ml-by-hand/