Launching Solveit – an antidote to AI fatigue

Summary

It’s a strange time to be a programmer. It’s easier than ever to get started, but also easier than ever to let AI steer you into a situation where you’re overwhelmed by code you don’t understand. We’ve got an antidote that we’ve been using ourselves with 1000 preview users for the last year. It’s changed our lives at Answer.AI, and hundreds of our users say the same thing. Now we’re ready to share it with you. Signups are open, and will remain so until October 20th. Over five weeks, we’ll give you a taste of how our new approach and platform, “Solveit”, can be applied to everything from programming challenges, web development, and system administration to learning, writing, business, and more. OK, let’s explain what on earth we’re talking about!… At the end of last year, Jeremy Howard (co-founder of fast.ai, Answer.AI, Kaggle, Fastmail, creator of the first LLM…) and I ran a small trial course titled “How To Solve It With Code”. The response was so overwhelming that we had to close signups after just one day. 1000 keen beans joined us for a deep dive into our general approach to solving problems. The first few lessons were taught via the vehicle of the ‘Advent of Code’ programming challenges and run in a new, purpose-built tool called solveit. As the course progressed, we had lots of fun exploring web development, AI, business, writing and more. And the solveit tool became an extremely useful test-bed for ideas around AI-assisted coding, learning and exploration. In the year since, we’ve continued to refine and expand both the process and the platform. We now basically live in the solveit platform. We do all our sysadmin work in it (Solveit itself is hosted on a new horizontally scalable multi-server platform we built and run entirely using Solveit!), host production apps in it (e.g all students in the course can use a Discord AI bot “Discord Buddy” that’s running inside a Solveit dialog!), develop most of our software in it, our legal team does contract drafting in...