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Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

answer.ai

91–100 of 109 posts

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#91

I'd urge folks here to atleast go through 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.

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. Stil…

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.

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#93
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!

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#94

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 Some blog posts: https://solve.it.com/#showcases on the main page And on of the students even made a project dashboard page showcasing all the thing…

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.

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 . (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 .

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#95
post #92

[stub for offtopicness]

This post and whole comment section is like a coordinated advertisement

yes, because we enjoyed the course and the community so much that we're very much looking forward to others joining

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#97
post #92

[stub for offtopicness]

@dang Looks like astroturfing. There are several comments by users with very little history, all mentioning that they took the course before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456502 (0 karma) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45460800 (1 karma) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456941 (4 karma) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459683 (3 karma) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45460321 (1 karma…

OK thanks. We've moved those comments (and this one) to a hidden "stub" subthread.

A reminder to everyone that the FAQ includes this:

Can I ask people to comment on my submission?

No, for the same reason. It's also not in your interest: HN readers are sensitive to this and will detect it, flag it, and use unkind words like 'spam'.

==

For all we know the Solveit guys didn't ask anyone to come and comment here, so we don't want to judge them (and they're good guys who have contributed positively to HN in the past). Sometimes people in a community – particularly an engaged and loyal one like Solveit’s seems to be – can be "too helpful" and act as though they're astroturfing, even though they're just sharing their excitement about the product and community.

The problem on HN is that it can be hard to tell the difference between authentic excitement and astroturfing.

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#98
post #58
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should look a bit more into the folks who made this before dissing their work like this.

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?

Let me see. Fastmail? The first LLM which actually used transfer learning for NLP? One of the most wildly useful and successful deep learning courses [available for free]? A big chunk of what is Kaggle?

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#99

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…

It's interesting, because the tool and the course is the very _opposite_ of vibe coding. But to each their own I guess.

Re: Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code

#100
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)

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