11 Python Libraries Every AI Engineer Should Know

Looking to build your AI engineer toolkit in 2025? Here are Python libraries and frameworks you
can’t miss!

By Bala Priya C, KDnuggets Contributing Editor & Technical Content Specialist on February 27,
2025 in Python

With LLMs and generative AI going mainstream, AI engineering is becoming all the more relevant.
And so is the role of the AI engineer.

So what do you need to build useful AI applications? Well, you need a toolkit that spans model
interaction, orchestration, data management, and more. In this article, we’ll go over Python
libraries and framework you’ll need in your AI engineering toolkit, covering the following:

 Integrating LLMs in your application

 Orchestration frameworks

 Vector stores and data management

 Monitoring and observability

Let’s get started.

1. Hugging Face Transformers

What it’s for: Hugging Face Transformers library is the swiss army knife for working with pre-
trained models and NLP tasks. It is a comprehensive NLP toolkit that democratizes access to
transformer models. It is a unified platform for downloading, using, and fine-tuning pre-trained
models and makes state-of-the-art NLP accessible to developers without requiring deep ML
expertise.

Key Features

 Massive model hub with thousands of shared models

 Unified API for di erent architectures (BERT, GPT, T5, and much more)
  Pipeline abstraction for quick task implementation

 Native PyTorch and TensorFlow support

2. Ollama

What it’s for: Ollama is a framework for running and managing open-source LLMs locally. It
simplifies the process of running models like Llama and Mistral on your own hardware, handling
the complexity of model quantization and deployment.

Key Features

 Simple CLI/API for running models like Llama, Mistral

 Custom model fine-tuning with Modelfiles

 Easy model pulling and version management

 Built-in model quantization

3. OpenAI Python SDK

What it’s for: The OpenAI Python SDK is the o icial toolkit for integrating OpenAI's language
models into Python applications. It provides a programmatic interface to interact with GPT
models, handling all the underlying API communication and token management complexities.

Key Features

 Clean Python SDK for all OpenAI APIs

 Streaming responses support

 Function calling capabilities

 Token counting utilities

4. Anthropic SDK

What it’s for: The Anthropic Python SDK is a specialized client library for integration with Claude
and other Anthropic models. It provides a clean interface for chat-based applications and
complex completions, with built-in support for streaming and system prompts.

Key Features

 Messages API for chat completions

 Streaming support

 System prompt handling

 Multiple model support (Claude 3 family)

5. LangChain

What it’s for: LangChain is a framework that helps developers build LLM applications. It
provides abstractions and tools to combine LLMs with other sources of computation or
knowledge.
Key Features

 Chain and agent abstractions for workflow building

 Built-in memory systems for context management

 Document loaders for multiple formats

 Vectorstore integrations for semantic search

 Modular prompt management system

6. LlamaIndex

What it’s for: LlamaIndex is a framework specifically designed to help developers connect
custom data with LLMs. It provides the infrastructure for ingesting, structuring, and accessing
private or domain-specific data in LLM applications.

Key Features

 Data connectors for various sources (PDF, SQL, etc.)

 Built-in RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) patterns

 Query engines for di erent retrieval strategies

 Structured output parsing

 Evaluation framework for RAG pipelines

7. SQLAlchemy

What it’s for: SQLAlchemy is a SQL toolkit and ORM (Object Relational Mapper) for Python. It
abstracts database operations into Python code, making database interactions more pythonic
and maintainable.

Key Features

 Powerful ORM for database interaction

 Support for multiple SQL databases

 Connection pooling and engine management

 Schema migrations with Alembic

 Complex query building with Python syntax

8. ChromaDB

What it’s for: ChromaDB is an open-source embeddings database for AI applications. It

provides e icient storage and retrieval of vector embeddings. Great for semantic search and AI-
powered information retrieval systems.

Key Features

 Simple API for storing and querying embeddings

 Multiple persistence options (in-memory, parquet, sqlite)

  Direct integration with popular LLM frameworks

 Built-in embedding functions

9. Weaviate

What it’s for: Weaviate is a cloud-native vector search engine that enables semantic search
across multiple data types. It's designed to handle large-scale vector operations e iciently while
providing rich querying capabilities through GraphQL. You can use the Python client library
Weaviate

Key Features

 GraphQL-based querying

 Multi-modal data support (text, images, etc.)

 Real-time vector search

 CRUD operations with vectors

 Built-in backup and restore

10. Weights & Biases

What it’s for: Weights & Biases is an ML experiment tracking and model monitoring platform. It
helps teams monitor, compare, and improve machine learning models by providing
comprehensive logging and visualization capabilities.

Key Features

 Experiment tracking with automatic logging

 Model performance visualization

 Dataset versioning and tracking

 System metrics monitoring (GPU, CPU, memory)

 Integration with major ML frameworks

11. LangSmith

What it’s for: LangSmith is a production monitoring and evaluation platform for LLM
applications. It provides insights into LLM interactions, helping you understand, debug, and
optimize LLM-powered applications in production.

Key Features

 Trace visualization for LLM chains

 Prompt/response logging and analysis

 Dataset creation from production tra ic

 A/B testing for prompts and models

 Cost and latency tracking

  Direct integration with LangChain

Wrapping Up

That’s all for now. You can think of this collection as a toolkit for modern AI engineering. You can
start building production-grade LLM applications and use these as needed.

The most e ective engineers understand not just individual libraries, but how to use them to
solve relevant problems. We encourage you to experiment with these tools. There may be
changes, new frameworks may become popular. But the fundamental patterns these libraries
address will remain relevant.

As you continue developing AI applications, however, remember that ongoing learning and
community engagement are super important, too. Happy coding and learning!

Bala Priya C is a developer and technical writer from India. She likes working at the intersection
of math, programming, data science, and content creation. Her areas of interest and expertise
include DevOps, data science, and natural language processing. She enjoys reading, writing,
coding, and co ee! Currently, she's working on learning and sharing her knowledge with the
developer community by authoring tutorials, how-to guides, opinion pieces, and more. Bala also
creates engaging resource overviews and coding tutorials.

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