From behind the scenes at Codesmith: Leadership changes and what’s next

1. Agree the core team/admin team and the instructor team is hardworking, no question there. But Codesmith's codebase is apparently a giant mess that looks like the largest OSP project - which isn't surprising because the people that work on it just graduated Codesmith. I would say the team has tremendous POTENTIAL but the technical people lack the experience to be called talented. Based on some alumni talk that someone told me about where Will tried to explain the Codesmith architecture (in an attempt to learn it himself) and it literally sounded like the worst code I've ever heard of for a 10 year old company that calls itself a tech company, something like deploying the entire codebase to 32 microservices that each ran one of them??? I know this sounds mean but it's just being real. Like every instructor I know that sees Codesmith defend the quality of the code or the legitimacy of how the code is managed makes them so furious I would recommend just not even acknowledging it. Some are resentful that after sometimes 2+ years of working there, they have nothing of quality to talk about and they feel lost. 2. Immersive grads that did the AI portion, which is like 500 out of 4500. Or do all grads get the $900 discount? 3. Lifetime hiring support was billed as "all you need for your career" when Eric was texting alumni a few years down the road to tell them not to go to Formation because he'll give them all they need (I have a text). For months alumni complain there are no mock interview slots available, like hardly any CSE's left, and there was a penny pinching move to have weekly office hours instead of 1-1 meetings. This is all great for a bootcamp, most don't offer anything! It's great Eric will take calls to help alumni later on. But the SUBSTANCE is not remotely "all you need" or a replacement for Formation and if you make it sound that way I'm going to keep harping on it. 4. I actually should give you more room on the AI program, I got really harsh on it after one of your employees Dogs started messaging me with extremely terrible AI responses and lost my cool. Like working with people who aren't being promised a job for $22,500 when you know your unofficial in progress numbers are tanking is what I'm upset about, but working with people who just want to learn something is fine and you can charge what you want. I will more respectfully challenge the pricing for sure, but we can have a civil debate about it. I also think that industry mentors doing talks works well, whereas in the immersive any industry person that comes in and gets pestered with these fake resumes from grads who want a job, leaves very upset at Codesmith. In the AI program that's not a problem. It erases half of my problems with Codesmith haha. I +1 the effort to get lots of points of view about AI because it's a tricky fast moving space. 5. I've said enough on pricing but the market will figure itself out. Formation will be offering more and more AI courses. And we have a platform with 23,000+ commits and 500K or so lines of code and thousands of contributions from dozens of industry engineers. We can offer incredible products for a fraction of the price of a human heavy operation and if we end up competing head to head then: 1. the market will decide 2. the market is large enough for 50 companies to do AI courses nevermind two and the market might show appetite for both.