I agree that it is super painful and confusing to implement RNNs in TensorFlow and had a similar experience starting out. You should take a look at https://www.

I agree that it is super painful and confusing to implement RNNs in TensorFlow and had a similar experience starting out. You should take a look at https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/scan https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/scan, that is one of the easier ways of implementing one I think. Other than that Pytorch is also great for experimentation and even has a nice example https://pytorch.org/tutorials/advanced/cpp_extension.html https://pytorch.org/tutorials/advanced/cpp_extension.html of implementing a variant of an LSTM. Contributing to this problem is that there is a ton of low quality blog posts on all of these topics.