Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Full Archive
Every captured entry — 6,269 posts, including 3,828 that didn't meet the Featured threshold. Newest first.
Page 6 of 126 · showing 251–300 of 6269
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited
I missed the last sentence and yes I already offered to bury the hatchet with Codesmith. I offered to publicly apologize for making people feel bad in my investigations if they publicly apologized. They declined to apologize.
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
We're on the same page that Will genuinely cares about improving education and genuinely cares about each Codesmith student and outcome.
The problem is he's not capable on the ground and his vision doesn't justify sharing thousands of students information in a call, losing the credentials for their AWS account, or his website leaking sensitive info like application gender and disability status. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything to support that.
He allegedly sold 70% of his company in 2015/2016....
Court documents allege an agreement to make $500K a year and up to 50% of profits (not sure what that is for $23.5M of revenue)...
It's not an excuse for sharing "Landman Season 1 Web Rip" repeatedly alongside a "U.S Treasury" folder on this computer.
It's terribly sad because he hired a ton of people from Upwork to address his deficiencies and they arguably made it all worse. The s…
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited
I took at look at the FULL website and my gosh it's such a mess, inconsistent headers, footers, links going in circles, inconsistent dates, graphs and numbers, inconsistent styles, boxes in weird layouts....
Like if Codesmith can't even vibe code their own website properly this company is done.
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited
Fake news. Email from Codesmith CEO, March 2025, a few months before that piece: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Well I think they believe they are selling the Nimbus 2000 of shovels and I'm like "hey this is the Shooting Star of shovels..."
And for doing that people try to ruin my life and the nicest and kindest community pulls out their knives and Reddit assassins try to take me out.
Very fucked up indeed.
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
100% there are a lot of stuff going on in the world that is more intentional bad than this, but 90% of people speed and only a few people getting speeding tickets. The cops allow a little speeding here and there but if you get caught, you can't use that as an excuse in court.
And ironically Codesmith can't use the fact that I did four years of research into them and Bloomtech and a few others as excuses when other people are "speeding" too.
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I mean the claims they make about training leaders at the best tech companies in the world are a bit dubious given their own website says of the "5000" people only 76 FAANG offers.
Their website also has bar charts that aren't even accurate (like the bars looks made up and are identical on two unrelated charts).
Like I know their founder went to Hack Reactor himself and is not STEM but it just feels like no one there knows what they are doing in a STEM industry to me but they are trying incredibly hard regardless. After so many fuck ups over and over the recilience is insane... if only they would learn their own role in those fuck ups and improve.
Ultimately the failure is in taking my criticism as attacks instead of as a useful perspective to think about whether they agree or not.
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Ok on the one hand, the rankings are on Forbes Advisor / Marketplace, which is incredibly ironic as the author of a blog post alleging that I was manipulating this sub as a moderator built his reputation "exposing" Forbes Advisor and alleging it was manipulating search.
I see Codesmith mentioned all over and I agree that it looks inconsistently represented... in one place it is ranked #6, not #1. And all of the coding bootcamp names that did NOT pay to play still brinf SEO traffic to the ones that DO pay at the top of the page.
On the other hand, I don't think Codesmith paid and they are not listed as a sponsored program... none of the Best of X awards individually is labelled but there is a section of sponsored programs above those and some are listed on both.
I fully agree that this appears to be shoving as much SEO friendly names at the bottom of the page to bring attention to the…
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs. · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati posted · ★ FEATURED
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs.
Codesmith updated their website in the past week and it appears to me in my personal opinion that their individual programs are being de-emphasized significantly.
Note: there are numerous references to being the Forbes #1 bootcamps, which is false and they should remove that. Forbes updated their rankings April 1st (3 weeks ago) and while they used to be last year, that is not correct anymore and the link they provide themselves no longer has them as #1. Forbes now assigns "Best at X" awards in a number of categories and Codesmith has 'best outcomes'... but does not have best for experienced coders, not best career support, not best for portfolio, not student support, not professional development, so that seems like a slip up or mistake.
What are they pivoting…
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Yeah nothing takes that away from him, it just seems he can't get his shit together as an operator based on my opinion of publicly available information.
Codesmith lost the AWS credentials and Codesmith's email and primary website were down for 3 weeks as they struggled to recover it.
He personally screen-shared evidence of pirated "web rip" copies Landman Season 1 and 2 numerous times in a public talk just a week or two ago about Open Claw.
He has intentionally screen shared his calendar numerous times in his presentations making it public info, student information numerous times.
Codesmith's website had numerous major security/PII issues that took several attempts to fix.
Codesmith student projects have leaked credentials, keys, etc... including a real charity's test Salesforce login information.
That's just a handful of explicitly public things off the top of my head that in my…
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/u_michaelnovati
u/michaelnovati posted ·
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Well I can give my personal opinion on that and I have been researching for a while.
I think Will is a gifted explainer. He said he wrote the Hard Parts originally because he didn't really know how to code well. I think he said in an interview he didn't know what a JS "Map" was when he wrote them. He has additionally said that he does talks when he wants to learn something because it forces him to learn in order to then present it to people as an expert.
So given that it's absolutely fascinating how well he can explain things he literally just learned.
He has additionally said that he never wanted to teach, but both his parents are teachers and he said that as a kid he would force his sisters into doing classes on the weekends at home where he would lecture to them on things....
So it sounds like he's a gifted lecturer and it's just his superpower.
My opinion is the situation is qui…
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it uses attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
It's up to you to decide if the lawsuit was relevant during this period of decline, but leaving it out of that blog post does not give you the information needed to do that.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want…
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/u_michaelnovati
u/michaelnovati posted ·
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts
2U + Berkeley Ext · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Unfortunately no at this point. I think the company U2 went bankrupt two years ago so I really don't think you'll have any shot with the restructured company that came out of it.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
Blatant vote manipulation
https://preview.redd.it/47hrmgwdp2vg1.jpeg?width=884&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dfe3b803936f167561e53994d69f0d85ed856f12
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy ★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it uses attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
It's up to you to decide if the lawsuit was relevant during this period of decline, but leaving it out of that blog post does not give you the information needed to do that.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want…
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
The more voting manipulation the louder and louder I'm going to get.
2U + Berkeley Ext · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
The other commenter is right. She might not be nice about it but this is a well documented system.
This is from 4 years ago: [https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/that-fancy-university-course-it-might-actually-come-from-an-education-company-11657126489](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/that-fancy-university-course-it-might-actually-come-from-an-education-company-11657126489)
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/bootcamps
u/michaelnovati posted · ★ FEATURED
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts
I wrote this piece about a lawsuit from 2024-2025 impacting Codesmith for many years. It's a neutral, factual summary of the public record that hasn't been told before that I can find... hundreds of pages of court documents summarized into something digestible.
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts)
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
Please keep going, we're monitoring and it's very helpful data collection.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
Please keep going, we're monitoring and it's very helpful data collection.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
And yup a couple of these comments are honeypotting view counts so I can send that over to Reddit and I have what I need.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
I made this new comment to honeypot the view counts against the other comment being crushed. Thank you all and I'm forwarding to Reddit!
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy
To whoever is responsible: Last time there was a mass downvote campaign someone lost all of their Reddit accounts, you all are playing with fire.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy ★ FEATURED
Vote manipulation continues. I'm not saying who is doing it, but someone is.
Comment after 2 hours from commenting: +4 karma, 60 views
2 more hours later: -7 karma, 92 views
So the first 60 people that saw this had a 4 karma rating
Then the nex 32 people 11 of them voted negatively.
The participation rate in commenting went from 7% to 35% suddently, **but only one one comment**
Makes no sense and regardless of who is doing it, it makes Codesmith look bad.
Especially after Codesmith's CEO sent me evidence unintentionally of hiring a Reddit market who manipulates Reddit comments and has had dozens of accounts banned from Reddit.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Explain the vendetta, explain the marketing strategy. Like there's no proof of any of the wild claims. No text messages, no slack messages, nothing... I'm one person, sharing my personal opinions, and not talking to anyone about them.
Yet I have many text messages, slack messages, and otherwise of people who were asked by Codesmith leaders to post and comment and share stuff on Reddit, LinkedIn etc...
I'm defending my reputation as a single person against a very large coordinated group and that's why respond to all of that.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · DELETED · archived copy ★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want my opinions about the lawsuit, I have many, and I'm not sharing them.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati posted · · edited ★ FEATURED
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts
I wrote this piece about a lawsuit from 2024-2025 impacting Codesmith for many years. It's a neutral, factual summary of the public record that hasn't been told before that I can find... hundreds of pages of court documents summarized into something digestable.
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts)
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Curious why you signed up? Like if you expected a job despite the negative sentiment, or if you just wanted to learn?
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Do you know how many people have signed up for cohorts since then? If any?
Like I've been researching Codesmith for 4 years and their student GitHub repos have very little signs of life relative to before. And they did a 3 month pause on new cohorts, breaking their years long tradition of overlapping cohorts and junior/senior model.
I know Launch School cut back from 3 cohorts for 2026 to 2 cohorts, which is their first reported decline, but they also aren't really a "bootcamp" and have never had a ton of students.
Looking for a bootcamp, please help · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
cc /udowcet referral code against rule
Has anyone done the Software Engineering Bootcamp through University of Chicago / HyperionDev? · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I'm not a lawyer. If things are laid out clearly in the fine print for a reasonable person to understand I do think the onus is on the reasonable consumer. But if the debate is over whether this is "reasonable" or not, I won't chime in on that.
My person opinion is that even the bigger bootcamps are small businesses in the grand scheme of things and have so few customers in the grand scheme of things that I think the market and actions of the bootcamp will ultimately be their demise if they are not communicating transparently and openly... like I said, bootcamps are shooting themselves in the foot if their numbers look unrealistically good in this environment and it's actually a negative signal in my opinion. Like what in my opinion happened to Codesmith... covering up a majority of ghosting alumni by counting 'LinkedIn verified placements' that boost numbers. Everyone can see with thei…
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Agreed, domain knowledge will now be leveraged 10X because AI will help people with domain knowledge apply that to things that previous required product marketing -> product manager -> designer -> engineer to turn into a product to do. They will be able to go straight to the output and lose less of the signal from playing telephone.
Engineers are going to have to built the tools and the glue to make that possible because LLMs alone can't do it.
Is it worth pursuing Medical Billing and Coding as a career change? · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
This is the wrong kind of coding for this sub. This sub is about programming and engineering, not medical coding/insurance.
Have/Are coding bootcamps taking advantage of people's need for instant gratification? · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
I don't think so intentionally. Maybe I'm naive, but the bootcamps I know the founders do really care and want to do good. It's more of a symptom of the psychology of the founders.
I have been doing a 4 year study of Codesmith and it exemplifies this.
Like Codesmith for example, the founder went from NOTHING to $25M a year. He was allegedly (according to court documents) making $500K a year + up to 50% of profits. Like that kind of overnight success could go to someone's head. Codesmith's founder hired a ton of people on Upwork to support him and they all just back up this vision of a genius who made $25M out of nothing.
And that's a big accomplishment right!
But in reality Codesmith was benefiting from the founder's natural teaching ability and a popular Frontend Masters course + and the very hot job market for SWEs. Many materials were allegedly copy-paste, the instructors just gra…
Have/Are coding bootcamps taking advantage of people's need for instant gratification? · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I feel like the bootcamp marketing has shifted and is more like a creepy run down gas station in the middle of nowhere in a horror movie, where the people stop because they ran out of gas but the place looks abandoned 20 years ago and the price caps out at $0.99 because there is only two numbers on the sign available, and then some sketchy person greets you a HUGE SMILE, welcoming you on in, and then you get kidnapped and tortured.
Has anyone done the Software Engineering Bootcamp through University of Chicago / HyperionDev? · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Two things to watch out for in that slide deck of outcomes
1. It's from 2024 and AI changes month to month. A number of industry engineers report not writing code anymore as of 3 months ago, so it's basically irrelevant what happened in 2024.
2. The 88% figure has some crazy fine print. If I'm reading it correctly, 88% of the people WHO GOT JOBS got them within six months and 12% took longer to get the job. But it's not the percentage of people that got a job.
TripleTen does a similar metric, but for TripleTen the weakness in the data is more that a huge number of people remain "active" by not graduating and not dropping out so they don't count in the stats and they are there too long to get job guarantee refunds.
I don't know if Hyperion is self paced with a similar gap but I would ask for clarity on the placement rates.
No program is perfect and any program that looks amazing in t…
Apprenti Program and Exiting · r/cscareerquestions
u/michaelnovati replied ·
What did they say when you asked them directly?
What does your contract say about it?
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I think I have a number of biases.
Our core business that we make money for is 'interview prep' and that doesn't have anything to do with AI (other than preparing people for AI-related interviews)
We use AI in the product to make it better than what humans can offer by themsevles.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I'm:
1. building AI products
2. using AI tools
3. not selling AI tools themselves, but incporating AI in more broader products
4. seperately we offer prep for AI interviews, AI upskilling, and other AI-content related things.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
My stance is the same as Karpathy's anyone who is not seeing huge productivity gains has a skill issue and not it's not an AI issue. If you think it's an AI issue you have a skill issue.
That's not meant to be mean or condescending, it just means that you haven't developed the skills yet to wield AI and you should be aware of that, rather than being in the group of people that could lose your job not being able to use it effectively.
I had an executive at a very large well know FAANG (I can't say which) just tell me that their legal people had pushed back on a 2 month long infra/SRE project and then there was a very bad site incident that would have benefited from that project, someone built the entire project with AI in two days - properly, security vetted because of the emergency, and legal allowed it and it saved the day entirely and fundamentally changed the view of AI.
This is re…
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I'm not trying to sound arrogant here but I'm building AI, I'm friends with many of the Facebook execs, Open AI has poached 3 employees from my small company, like I'm **100% BIASED** but not from hype or headlines, from what I see.
You can do you if you want, I'm just trying to help.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
ZIRP = zero interest rate policy, which resulted in companies getting loans with no interest to invest in things that were rational if they returned anything at all whatsoever, hence when interest rates shot to 5% it was an economic dampener on smaller companies.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I've never been a hype person and I'm usually like on the slightly early side of early adopters but definitely not a a bleeding edge user of new things.
my job as a product engineer is actually to recognize which things are across the chasm and which aren't and that's actually the judgment and taste I've built up
and from where I stand it's absolutely undeniable what's happening right now and I believe what Karpathy that anyone who is not seeing that benefit it has a skill issue with AI (that is totally addressable) and it is not an AI issue.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I think a privileged few who grow up with technology and have the space to explore at a young age will make it through as SWEs.
BUT I think that if you are a career switching your game plan is to not switch careers and look at bootcamps and education as a way to bring programming into your old job. All jobs will become more computer related and you can win in your old job by embracing that.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I count 5 factors impacting the market. But AI is taking an eraser to the job and not just shifting it.
1. end of ZIRP
2. AI
3. outsourcing
4. end of DEI hiring
5. oversupply of CS grads from learn to code
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
My argument is that AI is fundamentally replacing the work done by junior engineers. Permanently.
I discussed the argument you make in the essay. Basically my argument is that companies will eventually need to replace senior people but in the true capitalist way, because of lower demand of those jobs, they won't pay you to train you and you'll have to figure it out on your own hunger games style until a few people make it out the other side.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator · r/codingbootcamp
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Maybe you can be a champion for ways AI can help make the day to day both more fun and more efficient, try things out, propose things that work up later, try to get GM support.