RT-DETR is a groundbreaking end-to-end real-time object detector based on Transformers that combines the speed of YOLO with the accuracy of DETR. Key takeaways for engineers include the efficient hybrid encoder approach, which improves multi-scale feature interactions, and the uncertainty-minimal query selection scheme, enhancing accuracy in both classification and localization. Despite outperforming traditional CNN-based methods, RT-DETR faces challenges in detecting small objects, prompting future research directions like knowledge distillation.