7 ms·

Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

111 points by eries 1y ago

jph00 1y ago
Hi all - Jeremy Howard from Answer.AI here. Really excited to share with you all what we've learned over the past year about how to work with AI in a way that's entirely human-centered. Whilst most folks seem focused on how to remove humans from the loop entirely and make AIs do all the work, we've concentrated 100% on how to make humans part of the loop in a way that makes us more and more capable and engaged. I've enjoyed building and using our tool, "solveit", for the last year, and do basically all my coding, writing, reading, research, etc in it nowadays. I use small fast iterative steps and work to maximize my learning at each step.
- casparvitch 1y ago
  I'm slightly confused. From your comment I expected an AI chat tool, but solveit appears to be more a class?
  - jph00 1y ago
    It's both! We built a new platform designed to be a good place for using the approach we've designed. So it's a course, plus access to the platform. Sorry it is a bit confusing tbh!
    - casparvitch 1y ago
      No worries, keen to try out your approach.
eries 1y ago
Hey everyone, Eric Ries here. solveit is the AI environment I personally have been using every day for months, not just for code but for writing and research, too. it’s solved all the problems and frustrations I’ve had with both vibecoding and the limitations of the chatbot interface for doing deep work that requires concentration + the ability to understand the artifacts you are producing and, as a special bonus, people in this course will get a sneak preview of the new book I’m working on. we’re going to use it both to teach some of the concepts from it (on how to create mission-driven long-term companies) and how to use solveit for longform writing projects happy to answer any questions here, for folks that want to learn more, Eric
- jph00 1y ago
  (For those that don't recognise the name, Eric is the creator of The Lean Startup, and also founded the Long Term Stock Exchange. He's the co-founder of Answer.AI, which has built the solveit platform, and which fast.ai is now part of.)
  - jph00 1y ago
    Oops that should say "which fast.ai is now part of". s/not/now/
    - dang 1y ago
      I fixed it :)
- mritchie712 1y ago
  do you have a video of someone using it?
  - erikgaas 1y ago
    Here is a video showing off using solveit for creating a web app. https://youtu.be/DgPr3HVp0eg?t=3120 https://youtu.be/DgPr3HVp0eg?t=3120 To reiterate other comments, this is more about the methodology than the tool, but it is fun to see the tool in action too.
    - jph00 1y ago
      Thanks Erik - I've added that video to the article now.! :)
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - Yenrabbit 1y ago
    We also showed it as part of Hamel's course: https://x.com/HamelHusain/status/1956514524628127875 https://x.com/HamelHusain/status/1956514524628127875 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg) which is a longer example of the tool in action
waterproof 1y ago
I see a $400 price tag on a five week course. If it takes 5 weeks to learn how to use your product, I am skeptical that it has legs. Side note: supposedly this is the first cohort of this course, so how do you already have testimonials?
- jph00 1y ago
  As the post mentions, a year ago we did a trial of it, and have been working with that group of 1000 users since then. The course is about a methodology, not a product. It's the ideas Eric Ries and I have been working on for decades. 5 weeks is a crash course that can only touch on the ideas. And it covers learning data structures and algorithms, foundations of web programming, system administration, startup creating, and much more. It's really a rapid "how do to <x> the solveit way" for a variety of x. Each of those x is likely to become a full course in the future.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    You obviously see a ton of value here, but a bunch of industry professionals still aren’t getting it. This is a communication problem. Y’all probably should consider investing in a (different?) marketing or communications consultant.
    - LZ_Khan 1y ago
      +1 and a product manager
- edgemaester 1y ago
  It's not a course on how to learn how to use the product. It's a course on how to think and solve problems, which makes you more effective in using the platform.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    I guess I was lucky. I'm old enough that this was taught to me in school for free. That was way back in the day before it was outlawed.
rapsacnz 1y ago
So the antidote to AI fatigue is... more AI?
- jph00 1y ago
  No, the first example shown doesn't use AI at all. The AI is an optional helper in the process, if needed/wanted.
  - Diti 1y ago
    The AI is an integral part of the platform. My impression from reading the reviews on their website is that you won’t go anywhere using Solveit if you don’t let the LLM give you feedback. Sigh. I agree with the parent poster’s sentiment.
    - eries 1y ago
      as someone who uses solveit all the time, this has not been my experience
    - jph00 1y ago
      no definitely not the case.
    - coop57 1y ago
      I find I use the AI less and less the more I use SolveIt tbh
noduerme 1y ago
I read most of this before understanding that I wasn't reading about some new agent or IDE or something, I was reading a sales pitch for a coding course for would-be vibe coders, with AI training wheels in the form of ... a dialog box to talk to an LLM. I should have noticed the camp counselor / cultish / tedx vibes, throwin around REPL and feedback loops. I feel that it's somewhat misleading to present this as some amazing self-building software or server platform here, and bury the lede that what's being sold is an experimental tutoring method. It's almost like those "I built an AI agent that builds AI agents" posts, only instead of selling the sixty lines of python, it's selling a set of lectures that goes with them.
- drmiko 1y ago
  It's interesting, because the tool and the course is the very _opposite_ of vibe coding. But to each their own I guess.
- sho_hn 1y ago
  In other words, a grift. Same conclusion.
  - HSO 1y ago
    Maybe you should look a bit more into the folks who made this before dissing their work like this.
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      I did do that now, and I see a string of similar consultant-like training/course packages. It's a bit like when Deloitte comes by to pitch. What have they built that impressed you?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - Armstrongdr 1y ago
        I love almost everything they have done, I would highly recommend looking a little deeper.
pedalpete 1y ago
I'm sure I'm not the only one confused by this, but can you give details on why you decided that a course was necessary to learn this new way of working with AI? Maybe it's more of a alpha thing, but with millions using chatbots every day, was it not possible to develop a UI? It's not just about adoption, who has the time to spend 5 weeks learning a new tool? Particularly when you're competing with the existing tools?
- jph00 1y ago
  The course is about a methodology, not a product. It's the ideas Eric Ries and I have been working on for decades. 5 weeks is a crash course that can only touch on the ideas. And it covers learning data structures and algorithms, foundations of web programming, system administration, startup creating, and much more. It's really a rapid "how do to <x> the solveit way" for a variety of x. Each of those x is likely to become a full course in the future. (We actually built the tool for ourselves, and only decided to make it publicly available when we realised how much it's helping us. We're a PBC so our mission is not entirely financial. We're not trying to compete with existing tools, but provide an alternative direction.)
- Yenrabbit 1y ago
  We made the tool, and that will eventually be available on its own. But the method requires some discipline and 'unlearning'. It's very hard to show someone an AI tool and not have them treat it just like ChatGPT/Claude/... - that's the part that takes the time, and having a community of people working through different examples and case studies together is a lot more motivating for this than just staring at an empty prompt box :)
  - pedalpete 1y ago
    That's a good explanation, but I think the expectation when someone says they are "launching something" that is an antidote to AI fatigue, it may be better to say it's a course and a methodology. You aren't launching a tool.
    - 1y ago
sentrysapper 1y ago
dang. thought this was a service for people tired of reading about AI.
- eries 1y ago
  in a way, it is
hansmayer 1y ago
Without the intent of hijacking whatever it is you are trying to achieve: I've found the best antidote to the AI-fatigue is to rely less on it. There is no way I am going to spend my day, or my employees day for that matter in reviewing thousands of LoC of bad AI-slop. In my teams we've dialed it back to just consulting mode and asking suggestions,e.g. replacement for good old search, because once you ask the GenAI to write a few thousands of LoC for you, you're also abandoning a lot architecture decisions (which you then have to figure out ad-hoc again, when you do the review of the slop, or at the latest when you notice the "smart" tool has yet again put a secret in plaintext or something similar). So yeah, if you have the so-called AI-fatigue, just use less of the so-called AI.
- jph00 1y ago
  Absolutely right! Although I've found AI great for learning. It doesn't write my code for me, or my prose, or my devops scripts, but it's part of the process of me learning as I write them.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
erikgaas 1y ago
One thing I loved about the first solveit course was how create the community is. It goes back to fast.ai too, but everyone is super kind, smart, and has diverse backgrounds. We've captured a slice of that on our main site. Testimonials: https://solve.it.com/testimonials https://solve.it.com/testimonials Some blog posts: https://solve.it.com/#showcases https://solve.it.com/#showcases on the main page And on of the students even made a project dashboard page showcasing all the things everyone has built! https://solveit-project-showcase.pla.sh/ https://solveit-project-showcase.pla.sh/ He even blogged about it : ) https://himalayanhacker.substack.com/p/how-i-built-solve-it-project-showcase https://himalayanhacker.substack.com/p/how-i-built-solve-it-...
- threeducks 1y ago
  That testimonial page looks super fake. Why does the same Mathew Miller have 7 testimonials? Similarly, Pol Alvarez Vecino, Pierre Porcher and Duane Milne all have 6 testimonials. And almost all other users also have multiple testimonials. This can't be organic.
  - jph00 1y ago
    At the end of the last course we put out a survey and asked for feedback. There were multiple questions in the feedback form. That's why there are multiple quotes from each person. If you google any of those names you'll see they are absolutely real people. E.g. here's Pol's Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ayz0DtUAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ayz0DtUAAAAJ&hl=en . (And I see he's posted here on this HN chat too in fact.) Here's Mathew Miller on Twitter: https://x.com/matdmiller?lang=en https://x.com/matdmiller?lang=en .
ConanRus 1y ago
[dead]
nice_byte 1y ago
who tf would pay money for this??
- Armstrongdr 1y ago
  I will and did.
- pol_avec 1y ago
  who wouldn't? learning how to learn from one of the best, which additionally deeply cares about you
eries 1y ago
I thought it might be helpful to post a link to one of my favorite writeups from the beta cohort for solveit (last year). It's written by Chris Thomas: https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-agent-how-solveit-changed-my-programming-journey-after-25-years/ https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-a... a few quotes/excerpts: Being among the first 1000 people to experience SolveIt has felt like witnessing the early days of a significant shift in how we work with AI. As someone who is a seasoned programmer, I have seen many programming paradigms and the advance of AI coding tools. What makes SolveIt different is not just another tool or framework - it is a fundamental rethinking of the human-AI relationship. As I look at my experience with SolveIt, I think this is a better more sustainable approach to AI-assisted development. The current trend of ever more powerful models generating ever larger blocks of code feels unsustainable. SolveIt offers a different path. By maintaining human agency, working in comprehensible increments and building genuine understanding at each step, it creates a positive feedback loop where both human and AI capabilities grow stronger over time. This represents a partnership model that builds competence over time rather than creating dependence. The implications extend far beyond programming. Whether I am implementing computer vision algorithms, exploring culinary science, or writing technical articles - the same principles apply. Small steps, continuous understanding, iterative refinement and always keeping the human as the agent in the process.
LZ_Khan 1y ago
This is such a steep price tag. I loved what Jeremy Howard put up on fast.ai and respect the heck out of his team, but I've seen too many people scammed by online courses that sell a dream. This one seems to be selling a dream as well. I'll be purchasing the course to try it out but I think my concern is not a one-off thing.
- jayveeone 1y ago
  Is this an ad?
  - LZ_Khan 1y ago
    I'd say the fact that I'm unable to show purchase intention without being accused of being a shill proves my point.
    - jayveeone 1y ago
      I was unaware that you had a point.
- HSO 1y ago
  I participated in the first batch and am not a shill, look through my comment history. The dismissive comments here pain me as Ive seen them work hard on this over the last year as they integrated many of our feature requests and built out the platform. I’ve also had time to let the ideas sink in. You definitely cant hang back and expect some magic ai to do all the work for you. I also cant say „you will definitely benefit“ since everybody is difft. But i can honestly say it‘s the real deal, no ifs and buts.
stavros 1y ago
Why does this article not mention what solveit is at all? It talks about what they did, then that they made this tool, then that it's great, but what is it? Watch this video! No, give me a sentence or two about what it does. I'm not watching a video about a tool while reading a blog post about it because you couldn't be bothered to write a line or two about it.
- HSO 1y ago
  As someone who participated in the first cohort but is not part of their team, i would say it’s a programming environment for AI assisted literate programming. It’s like an intelligent notebook. That means you could use this for many different things but at least to me the high order bit is „AI assisted literate programming“
  - stavros 1y ago
    I see, thank you. Is this more of an exploratory programming tool, then? A Jupyter notebook with AI features?
    - HSO 1y ago
      Considering how the folks at answer.ai have been using (successive versions of) it to build this tool itself and judging by student projects and showcases, it definitely goes beyond exploratory. You can build big stuff with it. Personally I’m using it to learn the whole fastai ecosystem.
      - stavros 1y ago
        I'll give it a shot, thanks!
- jph00 1y ago
  That's fair! I guess since it's a new thing that doesn't quite neatly fit in a category, we were perhaps too shy about trying to define it. Also, we really want to focus on the methodology, rather than the platform. But yes, you're right we should explain the platform too. :) I'll have a go here, and will then go and add it to Johno's article. So basically, you can think of the platform as combining all these: ChatGPT; Jupyter Notebook + nbdev; Bits of vscode/cursor (we embed the same Monaco editor and add similar optional AI and non-AI autocompletion); a VPS (you get your own persistent full VPS running Linux with a URL you can share for public running applications); Claude Code (all the same tools are available); a persistent terminal. Then there's some bits added that don't exist elsewhere AFAIK: something like MCP, but way simpler, where any Python function can be instantly used as an AI tool; the ability to refer directly to any live Python variable in AI context (but optional, so it doesn't eat up your context window); full metaprogramming of the environment (you can through code or AI tools modify the environment itself or the dialog); context editing (you can -- and should -- directly edit AI responses instead of tell the AI it's wrong); collaborative notebook coding (multiple people can edit the dialog, run code, etc, and all see live updates). The combination of these things is rather different (and IMO better!) than the sum of its parts, but hopefully this helps a bit?
epolanski 1y ago
Ironically AI would've done a better job at summarizing what is this about than thousands of words of this post.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fzngagan 1y ago
I'd urge folks here to atleast go through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg before jumping to conclusions about what SolveIt or this course is about. Its the polar opposite of vibe coding IMO.
- balder1991 1y ago
  I watched the video and it’s basically a “Jupyter notebook” type of app where you can type code and chat with the AI. It’s nice cause it makes the interaction more dynamic and iterative. Honestly the “changing the answer” thing is something I always did on LM Studio when I wanted to change course. Definitely better than the limited interfaces of chatbots today, but I’m not sure it’s “revolutionary” by any means. Still, it’s something I’d prefer until someone finds a better way to interact with LLMs. The ability to add stuff, remove stuff, move things around etc. probably help a lot when you’re creating something. It better matches the state of our minds. Also I appreciate the “using AI for learning instead of producing slop or — like many posts I’ve seen before — optimized spam. I’m not sure what’s up with the course though. Seems more like a way to try to monetize something that wouldn’t be monetizable in any other way. In fact I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than me could just create a Jupyter Notebook plugin that would replicate most of what this is?
  - sesm 1y ago
    Yep, asking questions directly in the notebook, then editing the answer and executing it would be very powerful. I think `jupyter-ai` is close to this, judging by description, but I didn't try it.
getnormality 1y ago
I couldn't love more all the intentions behind this, but I have no idea what it is. Why would someone who already knows and loves Polya and iterative programming and human-centered technology... use this? What is the value add?
- eries 1y ago
  Jeremy attempted a summary here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456928 but, honestly, I hope that list makes you see why we had a hard time figuring out how to summarize what solveit is. For example, I use it for research and writing all the time, but you'd have a hard time seeing why a notebook plus a private VPS would do much for that use case. But it does! Having a general-purpose computing environment is just very, very useful in a wide range of situations.
- Armstrongdr 1y ago
  I personally think it is as a platform as a tool for thought. Building your solution and your knowledge at the same time by leaning on what LLMs do well, while avoiding the common pitfalls.
cogogo 1y ago
As a self taught hobbyist I progressed pretty far in advent of code 2023 until I gave up and less so in 2024 but my approach seems to be close to the one described (if you dig a little deeper into the signup page) or so I imagine. I was disciplined about not asking for help with the problem itself and went to chatgpt for help with components or syntax I needed to build a function I already had in mind (which was closer to the state of the art - especially in 2023 anyway). I think the advent of code problems are really interesting and have enjoyed solving them and watching others solve the ones I couldn’t. They are a fun way to frame the course. However the real value to me is learning how to approach more ambiguous problem spaces. I am definitely interested.
britannio 1y ago
I had access to GitHub Copilot as a student in early 2022 while learning Haskell and immediately realised that it would hinder my learning if I didn't turn it off and implicitly follow this understand, plan, execute, reflect loop. AI products like Cursor have the notion of an 'autonomy slider' [1] that can fortunately be turned all the way down (disable Cursor Tab) but relying on this discipline seems fickle when with the right agentic loops [2] and context engineering, thousands of lines of code can be churned out with minimal supervision. I've considered always working on two projects over a long timespan, one with no AI assistance, possibly in a separate IDE like Zed, and one in Vibe Kanban (my current daily driver) but this feels like an inefficient proxy to accelerating this four step learning loop with a tool like solveit. Since the solveit product isn't released and seemingly isn't competing with solutions, is there an opportunity to convey how AI product developers should be thinking about amplifying their users and keeping them in the learning loop? So far, I've seen Claude Code's Learning output style [3], and also ChatGPT's study mode but in these cases, the only product change is a prompt and solveit is more than that. [1] https://www.latent.space/i/166191505/part-a-autonomy-sliders https://www.latent.space/i/166191505/part-a-autonomy-sliders [2] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/30/designing-agentic-loops/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/30/designing-agentic-loop... [3] https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/output-styles#built-in-output-styles https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/output-styles#bu...
lsb 1y ago
fast.ai (some of the authors of this) was transformative for me, and the community was super nice. Cannot recommend looking into this highly enough.
jph00 1y ago
I apologise folks that we did a bad job of explaining exactly what we're launching! My bad. :( I've added this to the top of the article now -- I hope this does a better job of explaining things: ---- *tldr from Jeremy:* You can now sign up for Solveit, which a course in how to solve problems (including coding, writing, sysadmin, and research) using fast short iterations, and also provides a platform that makes this approach easier and more effective. The course shows how to use AI in small doses to help learn as you build, but doesn't rely on AI at all -- you can totally avoid AI if you prefer. The approach we teach is based on decades of research and practice from Eric Ries and I, the founders of Answer.AI. It's basically the opposite of "vibe coding"; it's all about small steps, deep understanding, and deep reflection. We wrote the platform because we didn't find anything else sufficient for doing work the "solveit way", so we made something for ourselves, and then decided to make it available more widely. You can follow the approach without using our platform, although it won't be as smooth an experience. The platform combines elements of all these: ChatGPT; Jupyter Notebook + nbdev; Bits of vscode/cursor (we embed the same Monaco editor and add similar optional AI and non-AI autocompletion); a VPS (you get your own persistent full VPS running Linux with a URL you can share for public running applications); Claude Code (all the same tools are available); a persistent terminal. Then there's some bits added that don't exist elsewhere AFAIK: something like MCP, but way simpler, where any Python function can be instantly used as an AI tool; the ability to refer directly to any live Python variable in AI context (but optional, so it doesn't eat up your context window); full metaprogramming of the environment (you can through code or AI tools modify the environment itself or the dialog); context editing (you can -- and should -- directly edit AI responses instead of tell the AI it's wrong); collaborative notebook coding (multiple people can edit the dialog, run code, etc, and all see live updates).
djsnuggz 1y ago
I participated in the first cohort and I'll be doing it again because I enjoyed it so much the first time around. The course focuses on teaching a robust problem solving approach, rather than explicitly teaching people how to program with AI. It's not a dream or a scam! If you digest the course concepts, the takeaways can be put into practice even if you aren't programming directly in SolveIt. But the SolveIt application certainly greases the wheels by making this problem-solving approach easier and fun! My growth as a programmer has been supercharged by what I learned and applied in the past year since taking the first course.
methusala8 1y ago
A great course and helps with learning proactively and not reactively. Important in this age of ai. I was part of cohort 1 and have enrolled for the next one.
tomhow 1y ago
[stub for offtopicness]
- edgemaester 1y ago
  I've been using SolveIt for about a month and going through the previous cohort content. It's really hard to not to try to vomit out solutions and to go about something in a methodical way. It makes your work visible, maintainable and usable by others (and frankly yourself). It takes a lot of practice, but it is very much intangible and always in the process of becoming. If you want to focus on solving pretty much any problem, and a path to using AI effectively in any endeavor, then this is a really fulfilling path. You will find that there is more magic in AI than you suspect. Many praises to Jeremy and Johno and the SolveIt team. But don't take my word for it. I'm a fresh convert. Go check it out for yourself. It is subtle and requires nuance, so not for everyone.
- jayveeone 1y ago
  This post and whole comment section is like a coordinated advertisement
  - pol_avec 1y ago
    yes, because we enjoyed the course and the community so much that we're very much looking forward to others joining
- Armstrongdr 1y ago
  I took the 1st course and really loved it. I got a little distracted by focusing on building web apps with fasthtml(which was covered in the course), but I think the practices that are tough are extremely important for anyone using LLMs on a daily basis. I am really excited to learn about all the new features in solveIt.
- matdmiller 1y ago
  I was part of the first cohort and I will be taking the course again. SolveIt has a unique take on how to best work with AI that helps produce better end products and helps you learn along the way. The platform is tailored to implementing the methodology taught in the course but the lessons can be taken when working in other AI tools to obtain better results.
pol_avec 1y ago
I was in the first batch, I'll be in the second and I'll probably try to be in any of the following. This is not a course about AI only. It is about learning how to learn and develop yourself specially with the coming AI age. The concepts learned here apply to solve other problems in life. I would recommend it to even non-programmers. All the industry is moving into vibe-coding, where we delegate more and more into AI, while we do less and less ourselves. The big issue with this is of course that you stop learning. You stop using the ability to put effort into things, and those things, like muscles, go away without use. It is very tempting to dismiss the solveIT approach as an outlier, at the end of the day if all industry is moving towards full automation instead of careful coding together with the AI, they are probably right, right? Well, AI getting better at coding, does not mean YOU are getting better at it. In fact it's actually the opposite, without practicing your ability to learn and solve problems, you will lose it. On another level, the kind of one-shotting where you give the AI a problem and come back later after 30 min (or more!) to check if it's done and throw it away if it went of the rails is psychologically. It is the same pattern on which slot machines operate, and gambling is about. I'm not saying vibe-coding is always bad at all, just there are a lot of caveats and people do not seem to be concerned about. Those concerns are front and foremost in the solveIT approach, Jeremy has a very thorough understanding about meta-learning for example, the slot machines insight was shared by Johno, and the full team has range of experiences that are rare in the narrow-minded AGI at all costs world of Silicon Valley. Your psychological health, learning abilities, and in general happiness in life are rarely the main concern of VCs but it rans firsts and foremost in Answer.ai (they are even a public benefit corporation, look it up if you don't know what is that). With that in mind, I recommend everyone to take the course because it is a multi-dimensional experience that will make you grow as a person and as an engineer. You just gotta look at previous fast.ai course & students. And finally, if you end up joining because you read this message, I'd love if you get in touch in the Discord server, my name is pol_avec. See you there!
clemrose 1y ago
Speed reading, so I hope I have not missed existing answers to these questions: 1. Does the 400 cover access to the platform and if so, for what duration and what usage quotas, etc. 2. Can we purchase access to the platform without the course, e.g let us play with it for N months (course seems aimed at junior level devs)? 3. The tools and method, as described, don't mention any tools for minimizing divergence/conflation/hallucination and maximizing repeatability/verifiability etc. Do you have a prompt optimization tool (ala DSPy), a built-in pipeline that uses one LLM to cross check another, or that uses deterministic tools to verify output of LLM (see Campbell, Wimsatt heuristic for managing/triangulating in uncertainty)? I'd be more interested in this new methodology if you were tackling head on the inherent limitations of LLMs (e.g. Yann LeCunn's vision)
- jph00 1y ago
  The 400 includes platform access from signup until a few weeks after course finishes. No quota - use whatever you need. You can't purchase access to the platform directly. It's not aimed at junior devs - e.g here's a post from a 25 year experience dev: https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-agent-how-solveit-changed-my-programming-journey-after-25-years/ https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-a... . Alums from the preview course include professors, senior VPs, etc. Our approach to using AIs is very different to automated approaches like DSPy -- it is all about human-in-the-loop; the human is the agent. We do tackle head on the inherent limitations of LLMs, but not using anything like JEPA (LeCun's approach).
  - bhollan 1y ago
    What's the subscription fee(s) like after the course's access ends?
daniel_jelinko 1y ago
I participated in the first cohort in January 2025 and have been using SolveIt ever since. I would like to share some thoughts about my experience of the course, platform and the community of makers & users. Explaining SolveIt is hard How do you explain to someone who's never written a line of code what programming feels like? When I'd visit my father-in-law, he'd ask me at breakfast what I was going to do that day. Every time I would give him the same answer: I will stare at the same blue screen all day long like I have been doing on every average workday since I started programming ~15 years ago. It's become our little family joke, but it's also true - it's difficult to explain to someone who has never done it. The question is what does that blue screen work actually involve? What does programming feel like? How do you live through it? What is your experience when you solve problems - is it painful or agreeable? Do you finish knowing more about the domain of a problem you tackled, or did you just get something working fast and hope it wouldn't collapse on you later? The SolveIt experience is similarly hard to explain to someone who hasn't tried it. What's interesting is that using the SolveIt method has had positive effects on all these areas - how my work feels, how well I understand what I build, and the quality of what I produce. For my first bigger, work related project in SolveIt I built an annotation interface for YouTube dialogue transcripts for documentary movie footage classification. I'd used Angular before but not FastHTML and HTMX. I had a working app in production within two weeks going from 0->users annotating, which might not sound very impressive in this new agentic era. But when using SolveIt right, the result isn't just working code, it's code that you know, and most importantly it's a much better understanding of your initial problem and the potential solutions/technologies to solve it. Plus, the SolveIt approach made me examine each component individually - what it represents, what it means for my system, how it could integrate more broadly into our organization. That exploration led to something far more general than my initial annotation app: now we are using it for browsing/editing dataframes through a UI, where columns and cells can have different templates/layout, edit history and several other features I hadn't even thought of initially. The exploration phase took longer, but I gained a foundation I understand deeply and can build on. For core business problems, that knowledge living in your head matters a lot. My only problem at the time was git integration - I wanted my work synced with my codebase and manual copy pasting was too much friction. This has been resolved since: I have my git repos accessible from SolveIt and AFAIK you can serve apps directly from the platform without needing to deploy it (though I haven't tested this functionality yet). Cult disclaimer I was surprised reading through this thread by comments about religious cults, paid marketing campaigns, and fake testimonials. It's true that I registered to Hacker News today just to share my experience with SolveIt. I am a real person though and have not received any money for writing this post. Instead, for several years now I've been learning from Jeremy Howard and the answer.ai team through their free resources - the fast.ai courses, talks, podcasts, and open source projects. Hamel Husain's work on nbdev also had a huge impact on how I work. All of this is available for free to anyone interested in learning. I hope that many others will discover them and SolveIt. I believe many successful projects, businesses and open source solutions will grow on the SolveIt ground, the same way it happened with fast.ai courses. On $$$ concerns: I paid $200 for the first prototype cohort. I thought it was worth much more than that - the course itself, plus unlimited 11+ month platform access (included Claude most recent model), plus the community discussions where I learned from other practitioners how they tackled specific problems from very diverse domains. When cohort 2 was announced, I knew I was gonna sign up even before I knew the price. The ideas you take and friends you make in these communities are priceless.
lysecret 1y ago
Ok so after watching the latent space pod and going through their docs my understanding of what they are doing: - solve it is mostly an approach less so an app they also build some Jp notebook style ide with branching and deep chat integration + a stateful vm which looks neat though - my definition of the philosophical approach is: don’t let ai ever generate code you don’t understand be there every step of the way and build things “bottom up” in a very incremental way (basically exactly how Jp notebooks have always worked) Now my view on the philosophy I actually don’t think I agree. With Claude code and codex I feel like my preferred development flow is “top down” to declare what you want on a high level and then let ai build some complete construct (making sure everything is type safe) and then dig in and understand this construct and iron out all of the details. I don’t think I need to understand fully each intermediate result. I absolutely fundamentally agree that every line of the final output has to be fully understood and signed off by you. Honestly, their videos and posts are very difficult to understand so if I misunderstood something I’m super happy to be corrected. I have high respect for the team and it’s nice to see theme excited.
- jph00 1y ago
  Yes I think you've done a good job of capturing the key ideas. Thank you for taking the time to look into it! I think you might be somewhat under-estimating the amount of novel ideas in, and the significance of, the solveit platform. But "chatgpt + vscode editor + jupyter + a persistent Linux server" is a reasonable starting point for thinking about what it consists of. It's totally fine to disagree on the philosophy. I suspect it'll turn out that both the approach you describe and our very different approach can both work, and are probably suited for different kinds of people and tasks. It's very early days and there's no established methodologies for AI-assisted software dev. I know our approach works and scales across a team of 10 and over a period of >1 year (and across multiple connected projects), since that's what we do in-house.

111 points by eries 1y ago

Hi all - Jeremy Howard from Answer.AI here. Really excited to share with you all what we've learned over the past year about how to work with AI in a way that's entirely human-centered. Whilst most folks seem focused on how to remove humans from the loop entirely and make AIs do all the work, we've concentrated 100% on how to make humans part of the loop in a way that makes us more and more capable and engaged. I've enjoyed building and using our tool, "solveit", for the last year, and do basically all my coding, writing, reading, research, etc in it nowadays. I use small fast iterative steps and work to maximize my learning at each step.

casparvitch 1y ago
I'm slightly confused. From your comment I expected an AI chat tool, but solveit appears to be more a class?
- jph00 1y ago
  It's both! We built a new platform designed to be a good place for using the approach we've designed. So it's a course, plus access to the platform. Sorry it is a bit confusing tbh!
  - casparvitch 1y ago
    No worries, keen to try out your approach.

eries 1y ago

Hey everyone, Eric Ries here. solveit is the AI environment I personally have been using every day for months, not just for code but for writing and research, too. it’s solved all the problems and frustrations I’ve had with both vibecoding and the limitations of the chatbot interface for doing deep work that requires concentration + the ability to understand the artifacts you are producing and, as a special bonus, people in this course will get a sneak preview of the new book I’m working on. we’re going to use it both to teach some of the concepts from it (on how to create mission-driven long-term companies) and how to use solveit for longform writing projects happy to answer any questions here, for folks that want to learn more, Eric

jph00 1y ago
(For those that don't recognise the name, Eric is the creator of The Lean Startup, and also founded the Long Term Stock Exchange. He's the co-founder of Answer.AI, which has built the solveit platform, and which fast.ai is now part of.)
- jph00 1y ago
  Oops that should say "which fast.ai is now part of". s/not/now/
  - dang 1y ago
    I fixed it :)
mritchie712 1y ago
do you have a video of someone using it?
- erikgaas 1y ago
  Here is a video showing off using solveit for creating a web app. https://youtu.be/DgPr3HVp0eg?t=3120 https://youtu.be/DgPr3HVp0eg?t=3120 To reiterate other comments, this is more about the methodology than the tool, but it is fun to see the tool in action too.
  - jph00 1y ago
    Thanks Erik - I've added that video to the article now.! :)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Yenrabbit 1y ago
  We also showed it as part of Hamel's course: https://x.com/HamelHusain/status/1956514524628127875 https://x.com/HamelHusain/status/1956514524628127875 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg) which is a longer example of the tool in action

waterproof 1y ago

I see a $400 price tag on a five week course. If it takes 5 weeks to learn how to use your product, I am skeptical that it has legs. Side note: supposedly this is the first cohort of this course, so how do you already have testimonials?

jph00 1y ago
As the post mentions, a year ago we did a trial of it, and have been working with that group of 1000 users since then. The course is about a methodology, not a product. It's the ideas Eric Ries and I have been working on for decades. 5 weeks is a crash course that can only touch on the ideas. And it covers learning data structures and algorithms, foundations of web programming, system administration, startup creating, and much more. It's really a rapid "how do to <x> the solveit way" for a variety of x. Each of those x is likely to become a full course in the future.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  You obviously see a ton of value here, but a bunch of industry professionals still aren’t getting it. This is a communication problem. Y’all probably should consider investing in a (different?) marketing or communications consultant.
  - LZ_Khan 1y ago
    +1 and a product manager
edgemaester 1y ago
It's not a course on how to learn how to use the product. It's a course on how to think and solve problems, which makes you more effective in using the platform.
- dylan604 1y ago
  I guess I was lucky. I'm old enough that this was taught to me in school for free. That was way back in the day before it was outlawed.

rapsacnz 1y ago

So the antidote to AI fatigue is... more AI?

jph00 1y ago
No, the first example shown doesn't use AI at all. The AI is an optional helper in the process, if needed/wanted.
- Diti 1y ago
  The AI is an integral part of the platform. My impression from reading the reviews on their website is that you won’t go anywhere using Solveit if you don’t let the LLM give you feedback. Sigh. I agree with the parent poster’s sentiment.
  - eries 1y ago
    as someone who uses solveit all the time, this has not been my experience
  - jph00 1y ago
    no definitely not the case.
  - coop57 1y ago
    I find I use the AI less and less the more I use SolveIt tbh

noduerme 1y ago

I read most of this before understanding that I wasn't reading about some new agent or IDE or something, I was reading a sales pitch for a coding course for would-be vibe coders, with AI training wheels in the form of ... a dialog box to talk to an LLM. I should have noticed the camp counselor / cultish / tedx vibes, throwin around REPL and feedback loops. I feel that it's somewhat misleading to present this as some amazing self-building software or server platform here, and bury the lede that what's being sold is an experimental tutoring method. It's almost like those "I built an AI agent that builds AI agents" posts, only instead of selling the sixty lines of python, it's selling a set of lectures that goes with them.

drmiko 1y ago
It's interesting, because the tool and the course is the very _opposite_ of vibe coding. But to each their own I guess.
sho_hn 1y ago
In other words, a grift. Same conclusion.
- HSO 1y ago
  Maybe you should look a bit more into the folks who made this before dissing their work like this.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    I did do that now, and I see a string of similar consultant-like training/course packages. It's a bit like when Deloitte comes by to pitch. What have they built that impressed you?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Armstrongdr 1y ago
      I love almost everything they have done, I would highly recommend looking a little deeper.

pedalpete 1y ago

I'm sure I'm not the only one confused by this, but can you give details on why you decided that a course was necessary to learn this new way of working with AI? Maybe it's more of a alpha thing, but with millions using chatbots every day, was it not possible to develop a UI? It's not just about adoption, who has the time to spend 5 weeks learning a new tool? Particularly when you're competing with the existing tools?

jph00 1y ago
The course is about a methodology, not a product. It's the ideas Eric Ries and I have been working on for decades. 5 weeks is a crash course that can only touch on the ideas. And it covers learning data structures and algorithms, foundations of web programming, system administration, startup creating, and much more. It's really a rapid "how do to <x> the solveit way" for a variety of x. Each of those x is likely to become a full course in the future. (We actually built the tool for ourselves, and only decided to make it publicly available when we realised how much it's helping us. We're a PBC so our mission is not entirely financial. We're not trying to compete with existing tools, but provide an alternative direction.)
Yenrabbit 1y ago
We made the tool, and that will eventually be available on its own. But the method requires some discipline and 'unlearning'. It's very hard to show someone an AI tool and not have them treat it just like ChatGPT/Claude/... - that's the part that takes the time, and having a community of people working through different examples and case studies together is a lot more motivating for this than just staring at an empty prompt box :)
- pedalpete 1y ago
  That's a good explanation, but I think the expectation when someone says they are "launching something" that is an antidote to AI fatigue, it may be better to say it's a course and a methodology. You aren't launching a tool.
  - 1y ago

sentrysapper 1y ago

dang. thought this was a service for people tired of reading about AI.

eries 1y ago
in a way, it is

hansmayer 1y ago

Without the intent of hijacking whatever it is you are trying to achieve: I've found the best antidote to the AI-fatigue is to rely less on it. There is no way I am going to spend my day, or my employees day for that matter in reviewing thousands of LoC of bad AI-slop. In my teams we've dialed it back to just consulting mode and asking suggestions,e.g. replacement for good old search, because once you ask the GenAI to write a few thousands of LoC for you, you're also abandoning a lot architecture decisions (which you then have to figure out ad-hoc again, when you do the review of the slop, or at the latest when you notice the "smart" tool has yet again put a secret in plaintext or something similar). So yeah, if you have the so-called AI-fatigue, just use less of the so-called AI.

jph00 1y ago
Absolutely right! Although I've found AI great for learning. It doesn't write my code for me, or my prose, or my devops scripts, but it's part of the process of me learning as I write them.
deleted 1y ago
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erikgaas 1y ago

One thing I loved about the first solveit course was how create the community is. It goes back to fast.ai too, but everyone is super kind, smart, and has diverse backgrounds. We've captured a slice of that on our main site. Testimonials: https://solve.it.com/testimonials https://solve.it.com/testimonials Some blog posts: https://solve.it.com/#showcases https://solve.it.com/#showcases on the main page And on of the students even made a project dashboard page showcasing all the things everyone has built! https://solveit-project-showcase.pla.sh/ https://solveit-project-showcase.pla.sh/ He even blogged about it : ) https://himalayanhacker.substack.com/p/how-i-built-solve-it-project-showcase https://himalayanhacker.substack.com/p/how-i-built-solve-it-...

threeducks 1y ago
That testimonial page looks super fake. Why does the same Mathew Miller have 7 testimonials? Similarly, Pol Alvarez Vecino, Pierre Porcher and Duane Milne all have 6 testimonials. And almost all other users also have multiple testimonials. This can't be organic.
- jph00 1y ago
  At the end of the last course we put out a survey and asked for feedback. There were multiple questions in the feedback form. That's why there are multiple quotes from each person. If you google any of those names you'll see they are absolutely real people. E.g. here's Pol's Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ayz0DtUAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ayz0DtUAAAAJ&hl=en . (And I see he's posted here on this HN chat too in fact.) Here's Mathew Miller on Twitter: https://x.com/matdmiller?lang=en https://x.com/matdmiller?lang=en .

ConanRus 1y ago

[dead]

nice_byte 1y ago

who tf would pay money for this??

Armstrongdr 1y ago
I will and did.
pol_avec 1y ago
who wouldn't? learning how to learn from one of the best, which additionally deeply cares about you

eries 1y ago

I thought it might be helpful to post a link to one of my favorite writeups from the beta cohort for solveit (last year). It's written by Chris Thomas: https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-agent-how-solveit-changed-my-programming-journey-after-25-years/ https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-a... a few quotes/excerpts: Being among the first 1000 people to experience SolveIt has felt like witnessing the early days of a significant shift in how we work with AI. As someone who is a seasoned programmer, I have seen many programming paradigms and the advance of AI coding tools. What makes SolveIt different is not just another tool or framework - it is a fundamental rethinking of the human-AI relationship. As I look at my experience with SolveIt, I think this is a better more sustainable approach to AI-assisted development. The current trend of ever more powerful models generating ever larger blocks of code feels unsustainable. SolveIt offers a different path. By maintaining human agency, working in comprehensible increments and building genuine understanding at each step, it creates a positive feedback loop where both human and AI capabilities grow stronger over time. This represents a partnership model that builds competence over time rather than creating dependence. The implications extend far beyond programming. Whether I am implementing computer vision algorithms, exploring culinary science, or writing technical articles - the same principles apply. Small steps, continuous understanding, iterative refinement and always keeping the human as the agent in the process.

LZ_Khan 1y ago

This is such a steep price tag. I loved what Jeremy Howard put up on fast.ai and respect the heck out of his team, but I've seen too many people scammed by online courses that sell a dream. This one seems to be selling a dream as well. I'll be purchasing the course to try it out but I think my concern is not a one-off thing.

jayveeone 1y ago
Is this an ad?
- LZ_Khan 1y ago
  I'd say the fact that I'm unable to show purchase intention without being accused of being a shill proves my point.
  - jayveeone 1y ago
    I was unaware that you had a point.
HSO 1y ago
I participated in the first batch and am not a shill, look through my comment history. The dismissive comments here pain me as Ive seen them work hard on this over the last year as they integrated many of our feature requests and built out the platform. I’ve also had time to let the ideas sink in. You definitely cant hang back and expect some magic ai to do all the work for you. I also cant say „you will definitely benefit“ since everybody is difft. But i can honestly say it‘s the real deal, no ifs and buts.

stavros 1y ago

Why does this article not mention what solveit is at all? It talks about what they did, then that they made this tool, then that it's great, but what is it? Watch this video! No, give me a sentence or two about what it does. I'm not watching a video about a tool while reading a blog post about it because you couldn't be bothered to write a line or two about it.

HSO 1y ago
As someone who participated in the first cohort but is not part of their team, i would say it’s a programming environment for AI assisted literate programming. It’s like an intelligent notebook. That means you could use this for many different things but at least to me the high order bit is „AI assisted literate programming“
- stavros 1y ago
  I see, thank you. Is this more of an exploratory programming tool, then? A Jupyter notebook with AI features?
  - HSO 1y ago
    Considering how the folks at answer.ai have been using (successive versions of) it to build this tool itself and judging by student projects and showcases, it definitely goes beyond exploratory. You can build big stuff with it. Personally I’m using it to learn the whole fastai ecosystem.
    - stavros 1y ago
      I'll give it a shot, thanks!
jph00 1y ago
That's fair! I guess since it's a new thing that doesn't quite neatly fit in a category, we were perhaps too shy about trying to define it. Also, we really want to focus on the methodology, rather than the platform. But yes, you're right we should explain the platform too. :) I'll have a go here, and will then go and add it to Johno's article. So basically, you can think of the platform as combining all these: ChatGPT; Jupyter Notebook + nbdev; Bits of vscode/cursor (we embed the same Monaco editor and add similar optional AI and non-AI autocompletion); a VPS (you get your own persistent full VPS running Linux with a URL you can share for public running applications); Claude Code (all the same tools are available); a persistent terminal. Then there's some bits added that don't exist elsewhere AFAIK: something like MCP, but way simpler, where any Python function can be instantly used as an AI tool; the ability to refer directly to any live Python variable in AI context (but optional, so it doesn't eat up your context window); full metaprogramming of the environment (you can through code or AI tools modify the environment itself or the dialog); context editing (you can -- and should -- directly edit AI responses instead of tell the AI it's wrong); collaborative notebook coding (multiple people can edit the dialog, run code, etc, and all see live updates). The combination of these things is rather different (and IMO better!) than the sum of its parts, but hopefully this helps a bit?

epolanski 1y ago

Ironically AI would've done a better job at summarizing what is this about than thousands of words of this post.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

fzngagan 1y ago

I'd urge folks here to atleast go through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg before jumping to conclusions about what SolveIt or this course is about. Its the polar opposite of vibe coding IMO.

balder1991 1y ago
I watched the video and it’s basically a “Jupyter notebook” type of app where you can type code and chat with the AI. It’s nice cause it makes the interaction more dynamic and iterative. Honestly the “changing the answer” thing is something I always did on LM Studio when I wanted to change course. Definitely better than the limited interfaces of chatbots today, but I’m not sure it’s “revolutionary” by any means. Still, it’s something I’d prefer until someone finds a better way to interact with LLMs. The ability to add stuff, remove stuff, move things around etc. probably help a lot when you’re creating something. It better matches the state of our minds. Also I appreciate the “using AI for learning instead of producing slop or — like many posts I’ve seen before — optimized spam. I’m not sure what’s up with the course though. Seems more like a way to try to monetize something that wouldn’t be monetizable in any other way. In fact I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than me could just create a Jupyter Notebook plugin that would replicate most of what this is?
- sesm 1y ago
  Yep, asking questions directly in the notebook, then editing the answer and executing it would be very powerful. I think `jupyter-ai` is close to this, judging by description, but I didn't try it.

getnormality 1y ago

I couldn't love more all the intentions behind this, but I have no idea what it is. Why would someone who already knows and loves Polya and iterative programming and human-centered technology... use this? What is the value add?

eries 1y ago
Jeremy attempted a summary here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456928 but, honestly, I hope that list makes you see why we had a hard time figuring out how to summarize what solveit is. For example, I use it for research and writing all the time, but you'd have a hard time seeing why a notebook plus a private VPS would do much for that use case. But it does! Having a general-purpose computing environment is just very, very useful in a wide range of situations.
Armstrongdr 1y ago
I personally think it is as a platform as a tool for thought. Building your solution and your knowledge at the same time by leaning on what LLMs do well, while avoiding the common pitfalls.

cogogo 1y ago

As a self taught hobbyist I progressed pretty far in advent of code 2023 until I gave up and less so in 2024 but my approach seems to be close to the one described (if you dig a little deeper into the signup page) or so I imagine. I was disciplined about not asking for help with the problem itself and went to chatgpt for help with components or syntax I needed to build a function I already had in mind (which was closer to the state of the art - especially in 2023 anyway). I think the advent of code problems are really interesting and have enjoyed solving them and watching others solve the ones I couldn’t. They are a fun way to frame the course. However the real value to me is learning how to approach more ambiguous problem spaces. I am definitely interested.

britannio 1y ago

I had access to GitHub Copilot as a student in early 2022 while learning Haskell and immediately realised that it would hinder my learning if I didn't turn it off and implicitly follow this understand, plan, execute, reflect loop. AI products like Cursor have the notion of an 'autonomy slider' [1] that can fortunately be turned all the way down (disable Cursor Tab) but relying on this discipline seems fickle when with the right agentic loops [2] and context engineering, thousands of lines of code can be churned out with minimal supervision. I've considered always working on two projects over a long timespan, one with no AI assistance, possibly in a separate IDE like Zed, and one in Vibe Kanban (my current daily driver) but this feels like an inefficient proxy to accelerating this four step learning loop with a tool like solveit. Since the solveit product isn't released and seemingly isn't competing with solutions, is there an opportunity to convey how AI product developers should be thinking about amplifying their users and keeping them in the learning loop? So far, I've seen Claude Code's Learning output style [3], and also ChatGPT's study mode but in these cases, the only product change is a prompt and solveit is more than that. [1] https://www.latent.space/i/166191505/part-a-autonomy-sliders https://www.latent.space/i/166191505/part-a-autonomy-sliders [2] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/30/designing-agentic-loops/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/30/designing-agentic-loop... [3] https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/output-styles#built-in-output-styles https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/output-styles#bu...

lsb 1y ago

fast.ai (some of the authors of this) was transformative for me, and the community was super nice. Cannot recommend looking into this highly enough.

jph00 1y ago

I apologise folks that we did a bad job of explaining exactly what we're launching! My bad. :( I've added this to the top of the article now -- I hope this does a better job of explaining things: ---- *tldr from Jeremy:* You can now sign up for Solveit, which a course in how to solve problems (including coding, writing, sysadmin, and research) using fast short iterations, and also provides a platform that makes this approach easier and more effective. The course shows how to use AI in small doses to help learn as you build, but doesn't rely on AI at all -- you can totally avoid AI if you prefer. The approach we teach is based on decades of research and practice from Eric Ries and I, the founders of Answer.AI. It's basically the opposite of "vibe coding"; it's all about small steps, deep understanding, and deep reflection. We wrote the platform because we didn't find anything else sufficient for doing work the "solveit way", so we made something for ourselves, and then decided to make it available more widely. You can follow the approach without using our platform, although it won't be as smooth an experience. The platform combines elements of all these: ChatGPT; Jupyter Notebook + nbdev; Bits of vscode/cursor (we embed the same Monaco editor and add similar optional AI and non-AI autocompletion); a VPS (you get your own persistent full VPS running Linux with a URL you can share for public running applications); Claude Code (all the same tools are available); a persistent terminal. Then there's some bits added that don't exist elsewhere AFAIK: something like MCP, but way simpler, where any Python function can be instantly used as an AI tool; the ability to refer directly to any live Python variable in AI context (but optional, so it doesn't eat up your context window); full metaprogramming of the environment (you can through code or AI tools modify the environment itself or the dialog); context editing (you can -- and should -- directly edit AI responses instead of tell the AI it's wrong); collaborative notebook coding (multiple people can edit the dialog, run code, etc, and all see live updates).

djsnuggz 1y ago

I participated in the first cohort and I'll be doing it again because I enjoyed it so much the first time around. The course focuses on teaching a robust problem solving approach, rather than explicitly teaching people how to program with AI. It's not a dream or a scam! If you digest the course concepts, the takeaways can be put into practice even if you aren't programming directly in SolveIt. But the SolveIt application certainly greases the wheels by making this problem-solving approach easier and fun! My growth as a programmer has been supercharged by what I learned and applied in the past year since taking the first course.

methusala8 1y ago

A great course and helps with learning proactively and not reactively. Important in this age of ai. I was part of cohort 1 and have enrolled for the next one.

tomhow 1y ago

[stub for offtopicness]

edgemaester 1y ago
I've been using SolveIt for about a month and going through the previous cohort content. It's really hard to not to try to vomit out solutions and to go about something in a methodical way. It makes your work visible, maintainable and usable by others (and frankly yourself). It takes a lot of practice, but it is very much intangible and always in the process of becoming. If you want to focus on solving pretty much any problem, and a path to using AI effectively in any endeavor, then this is a really fulfilling path. You will find that there is more magic in AI than you suspect. Many praises to Jeremy and Johno and the SolveIt team. But don't take my word for it. I'm a fresh convert. Go check it out for yourself. It is subtle and requires nuance, so not for everyone.
jayveeone 1y ago
This post and whole comment section is like a coordinated advertisement
- pol_avec 1y ago
  yes, because we enjoyed the course and the community so much that we're very much looking forward to others joining
Armstrongdr 1y ago
I took the 1st course and really loved it. I got a little distracted by focusing on building web apps with fasthtml(which was covered in the course), but I think the practices that are tough are extremely important for anyone using LLMs on a daily basis. I am really excited to learn about all the new features in solveIt.
matdmiller 1y ago
I was part of the first cohort and I will be taking the course again. SolveIt has a unique take on how to best work with AI that helps produce better end products and helps you learn along the way. The platform is tailored to implementing the methodology taught in the course but the lessons can be taken when working in other AI tools to obtain better results.

pol_avec 1y ago

I was in the first batch, I'll be in the second and I'll probably try to be in any of the following. This is not a course about AI only. It is about learning how to learn and develop yourself specially with the coming AI age. The concepts learned here apply to solve other problems in life. I would recommend it to even non-programmers. All the industry is moving into vibe-coding, where we delegate more and more into AI, while we do less and less ourselves. The big issue with this is of course that you stop learning. You stop using the ability to put effort into things, and those things, like muscles, go away without use. It is very tempting to dismiss the solveIT approach as an outlier, at the end of the day if all industry is moving towards full automation instead of careful coding together with the AI, they are probably right, right? Well, AI getting better at coding, does not mean YOU are getting better at it. In fact it's actually the opposite, without practicing your ability to learn and solve problems, you will lose it. On another level, the kind of one-shotting where you give the AI a problem and come back later after 30 min (or more!) to check if it's done and throw it away if it went of the rails is psychologically. It is the same pattern on which slot machines operate, and gambling is about. I'm not saying vibe-coding is always bad at all, just there are a lot of caveats and people do not seem to be concerned about. Those concerns are front and foremost in the solveIT approach, Jeremy has a very thorough understanding about meta-learning for example, the slot machines insight was shared by Johno, and the full team has range of experiences that are rare in the narrow-minded AGI at all costs world of Silicon Valley. Your psychological health, learning abilities, and in general happiness in life are rarely the main concern of VCs but it rans firsts and foremost in Answer.ai (they are even a public benefit corporation, look it up if you don't know what is that). With that in mind, I recommend everyone to take the course because it is a multi-dimensional experience that will make you grow as a person and as an engineer. You just gotta look at previous fast.ai course & students. And finally, if you end up joining because you read this message, I'd love if you get in touch in the Discord server, my name is pol_avec. See you there!

clemrose 1y ago

Speed reading, so I hope I have not missed existing answers to these questions: 1. Does the 400 cover access to the platform and if so, for what duration and what usage quotas, etc. 2. Can we purchase access to the platform without the course, e.g let us play with it for N months (course seems aimed at junior level devs)? 3. The tools and method, as described, don't mention any tools for minimizing divergence/conflation/hallucination and maximizing repeatability/verifiability etc. Do you have a prompt optimization tool (ala DSPy), a built-in pipeline that uses one LLM to cross check another, or that uses deterministic tools to verify output of LLM (see Campbell, Wimsatt heuristic for managing/triangulating in uncertainty)? I'd be more interested in this new methodology if you were tackling head on the inherent limitations of LLMs (e.g. Yann LeCunn's vision)

jph00 1y ago
The 400 includes platform access from signup until a few weeks after course finishes. No quota - use whatever you need. You can't purchase access to the platform directly. It's not aimed at junior devs - e.g here's a post from a 25 year experience dev: https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-agent-how-solveit-changed-my-programming-journey-after-25-years/ https://christhomas.co.uk/blog/2025/09/24/the-human-is-the-a... . Alums from the preview course include professors, senior VPs, etc. Our approach to using AIs is very different to automated approaches like DSPy -- it is all about human-in-the-loop; the human is the agent. We do tackle head on the inherent limitations of LLMs, but not using anything like JEPA (LeCun's approach).
- bhollan 1y ago
  What's the subscription fee(s) like after the course's access ends?

daniel_jelinko 1y ago

I participated in the first cohort in January 2025 and have been using SolveIt ever since. I would like to share some thoughts about my experience of the course, platform and the community of makers & users. Explaining SolveIt is hard How do you explain to someone who's never written a line of code what programming feels like? When I'd visit my father-in-law, he'd ask me at breakfast what I was going to do that day. Every time I would give him the same answer: I will stare at the same blue screen all day long like I have been doing on every average workday since I started programming ~15 years ago. It's become our little family joke, but it's also true - it's difficult to explain to someone who has never done it. The question is what does that blue screen work actually involve? What does programming feel like? How do you live through it? What is your experience when you solve problems - is it painful or agreeable? Do you finish knowing more about the domain of a problem you tackled, or did you just get something working fast and hope it wouldn't collapse on you later? The SolveIt experience is similarly hard to explain to someone who hasn't tried it. What's interesting is that using the SolveIt method has had positive effects on all these areas - how my work feels, how well I understand what I build, and the quality of what I produce. For my first bigger, work related project in SolveIt I built an annotation interface for YouTube dialogue transcripts for documentary movie footage classification. I'd used Angular before but not FastHTML and HTMX. I had a working app in production within two weeks going from 0->users annotating, which might not sound very impressive in this new agentic era. But when using SolveIt right, the result isn't just working code, it's code that you know, and most importantly it's a much better understanding of your initial problem and the potential solutions/technologies to solve it. Plus, the SolveIt approach made me examine each component individually - what it represents, what it means for my system, how it could integrate more broadly into our organization. That exploration led to something far more general than my initial annotation app: now we are using it for browsing/editing dataframes through a UI, where columns and cells can have different templates/layout, edit history and several other features I hadn't even thought of initially. The exploration phase took longer, but I gained a foundation I understand deeply and can build on. For core business problems, that knowledge living in your head matters a lot. My only problem at the time was git integration - I wanted my work synced with my codebase and manual copy pasting was too much friction. This has been resolved since: I have my git repos accessible from SolveIt and AFAIK you can serve apps directly from the platform without needing to deploy it (though I haven't tested this functionality yet). Cult disclaimer I was surprised reading through this thread by comments about religious cults, paid marketing campaigns, and fake testimonials. It's true that I registered to Hacker News today just to share my experience with SolveIt. I am a real person though and have not received any money for writing this post. Instead, for several years now I've been learning from Jeremy Howard and the answer.ai team through their free resources - the fast.ai courses, talks, podcasts, and open source projects. Hamel Husain's work on nbdev also had a huge impact on how I work. All of this is available for free to anyone interested in learning. I hope that many others will discover them and SolveIt. I believe many successful projects, businesses and open source solutions will grow on the SolveIt ground, the same way it happened with fast.ai courses. On $$$ concerns: I paid $200 for the first prototype cohort. I thought it was worth much more than that - the course itself, plus unlimited 11+ month platform access (included Claude most recent model), plus the community discussions where I learned from other practitioners how they tackled specific problems from very diverse domains. When cohort 2 was announced, I knew I was gonna sign up even before I knew the price. The ideas you take and friends you make in these communities are priceless.

lysecret 1y ago

Ok so after watching the latent space pod and going through their docs my understanding of what they are doing: - solve it is mostly an approach less so an app they also build some Jp notebook style ide with branching and deep chat integration + a stateful vm which looks neat though - my definition of the philosophical approach is: don’t let ai ever generate code you don’t understand be there every step of the way and build things “bottom up” in a very incremental way (basically exactly how Jp notebooks have always worked) Now my view on the philosophy I actually don’t think I agree. With Claude code and codex I feel like my preferred development flow is “top down” to declare what you want on a high level and then let ai build some complete construct (making sure everything is type safe) and then dig in and understand this construct and iron out all of the details. I don’t think I need to understand fully each intermediate result. I absolutely fundamentally agree that every line of the final output has to be fully understood and signed off by you. Honestly, their videos and posts are very difficult to understand so if I misunderstood something I’m super happy to be corrected. I have high respect for the team and it’s nice to see theme excited.

jph00 1y ago
Yes I think you've done a good job of capturing the key ideas. Thank you for taking the time to look into it! I think you might be somewhat under-estimating the amount of novel ideas in, and the significance of, the solveit platform. But "chatgpt + vscode editor + jupyter + a persistent Linux server" is a reasonable starting point for thinking about what it consists of. It's totally fine to disagree on the philosophy. I suspect it'll turn out that both the approach you describe and our very different approach can both work, and are probably suited for different kinds of people and tasks. It's very early days and there's no established methodologies for AI-assisted software dev. I know our approach works and scales across a team of 10 and over a period of >1 year (and across multiple connected projects), since that's what we do in-house.