GenAI for Java Developers 2: Techniques

Resources: https://aka.ms/JavaAndAIForBeginners https://aka.ms/genaijava In this episode, Ayan Gupta is joined once again by Rory, who takes you on a deep dive into the core techniques that power generative AI applications. Building on the environment setup from Session "GenAI for Java Developers 1: Getting started", this session explores the different "brewing buttons" of GenAI, each one unlocking a completely different way to leverage AI in your Java applications. Think of it like a coffee machine with different buttons: espresso, cappuccino, latte. Each setting produces a unique result. Similarly, GenAI offers multiple techniques, completions, multi-turn chat, interactive chat, RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), and function calling—that enable you to build diverse AI-powered features. Rory demonstrates each technique hands-on using the GitHub Codespaces environment. You'll learn how to implement simple LLM completions for one-turn interactions, build multi-turn conversations that maintain context and history, create interactive chat applications that respond to user input in real-time, implement RAG to ground your AI responses in specific documents and prevent hallucinations, and use function calling to connect AI to business-critical operations like weather APIs and calculators. Each example includes practical code that you can run and modify yourself. By understanding these fundamental techniques, you'll have the building blocks to create sophisticated AI applications. This session builds directly toward the next session, where we'll put these techniques into practice by building three complete applications. Whether you're building chatbots, knowledge bases, or intelligent assistants, these techniques are essential. Subscribe and follow along as we continue this exciting journey! 0:00 - Introduction: Different Techniques, Different Results 0:50 - Setting Up the Code Space 1:04 - Technique 1: LLM Completions 1:50 - Testing Simple Completions 2:16 - Tec