Codesmith marketing campaign: "you’re not late to tech". Unfortunately you likely are, and this kind of thing is tone deaf and misleading. Instead of making changes in their program structure they are marketing a 10 year old program structure as if it still works and please don't fall for it.

Absolutely! 1. We spent literally 5 years building a platform from scratch where people can practice anything and do dynamically scheduled mentorships sessions on anything. So we're adapting in real time to AI. We've added a dozen new AI features in the past few months. We've increased the experience bar for people to work with. We're paying very very close attention to interview changes that are happening with AI out there. 2. We're introducing our first AI-specific tracks shortly and started offering one off sessions to iterate on those within our platform engine. The goal of this is to help people become more efficient engineers on the job and keep up with AI. 3. It's entirely possible that AI will crush a lot of SWE industry. It's not a guarantee but a possibility we have to prepare for. In that world, competition for the top SWEs is even more and we'll play a role helping those people prepare for lucractive senior+ engineering roles - it's what we already do, but probably more adaptive on the behaviorally prep. In the world where AI creates tons of new jobs that are SWE adjacent, our platform already supports things and we built this engine for five years, 500K lines of code, all devoted to topic-agnostic practice, and we'll be able to adjust to those new roles faster than anyone else can. 4. In the world where off the shelf AI does a better job than we can do at Formation and renders our product useless - we will cease to exist and shut down. We also have to prepare for that reality, just like bootcamps should have been preparing for the one they are in now and the ones that didn't are gone or soon gone. Our rule of thumb when building AI is we have to ask ourselves "can I do this in ChatGPT" and if the answer is yes, then we don't ship it no matter what. We have to be delivering value to people or we don't deserve to exist. We deliver value in practice, mentor sessions, mock interviews, job hunt strategy, negotiation, accountability, and hyper personalization based on proprietary data on your interview-prep journey. As long as one of these is value-add to the world we will exist in some form, but if AI replaces all of them and we can't do better than ChatGPT we won't be fighting for our existence like Codesmith is, we will shut down.