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 to?
\- They are offering bespoke consulting services to enhance corporate teams with AI.
\- They are touting the expertise of the Founder in AI (with their CEO for product and Senior Advisor for leadership).
\- They are also emphasizing their public sector offerings. Public sources currently indicated $0 of payouts from their "$118M IRS BPA" (which can be lagging and doesn't mean anything necessarily, but its not like this has proven to be a smash hit). Public sources also indicate that the "program lead" for an IRS program was hired on Upwork for $40/hr, which doesn't seem like the 'top 1% talent at the best companies in the industry' in that case at least, in my opinion.
Why I perceive a decline in my opinion from the public info on their website?
\- The incorrect "Forbes #1 Software Engineering + AI/ML program" thing I mentioned above. Not sure what's going on with that but its EVERYWHERE and can't be backed up as of April 1st
\- There are 2 TOTAL upcoming events and they used to have a dozen a week and dozens listed
\- There hasn't been a blog post in six months
\- The about page has mostly staff who no longer work at Codesmith for months according to LinkedIn
\- Their cohorts used to overlap every 7 weeks and now are running at least back to back, meaning only a handful of cohorts in 2026
\- GitHub activity, excluding Future Code (which is not continuing in 2026) has almost no activity on it from current residents indicating there are minimal number of people enrolled right now.
\- Their most recent officially published outcomes (in California) showed a vast majority of "placements" were unresponsive LinkedIn verifications, and in the past Codesmith's community was very close and highly responsive to placement verification.
\------------
I know I'm tough on Codesmith in my personal opinions, but its just that they can't seem to get their act together after incident after incident after lawsuit after outage after incident. Like plastering your brand new website with "Forbes #1" when I don't see anywhere on Forbes (including the link they provide themselves) that says that. It's just sloppy and disorganized for an institution that is called the "Harvard of bootcamps"
**Anyone else have personal opinions on the new direction Codesmith is taking?**
DISCLOSURES: I used to be a moderator here and was accused of going after Codesmith intentionally as a competitor in the past. These allegations are a combination of false statements, opinions, and misrepresentations and I strongly disagree with them.
NOTE: Reddit bad guys who have proven to manipulate my content about Codesmith, you leave a paper trail so Reddit can go after you all and it doesn't work and this behavior only harmed Codesmith's Reddit reputation in the past.
u/ConsistentPeach927 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Lol you can buy the rankings on Forbes dude. Total pay to play on there.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· 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 sponsored ones at the top, but Codesmith doesn't appear to have paid, more like being used.
They are routing this #1 thing in marketing everywhere, in press releases, the Founder's bio everywhere, the CEO is pushing it...
Like it doesn't check out, and if you Google and the only ranking you find is #6, it just feels like a scam in my opinion.
u/ericswc wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
They’ll fail at this too, yawn.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ 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.
u/Suspicious-Engineer7 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Kind of a sad fate. I do believe that academia shouldn't have the stranglehold on living wage office jobs that it does, and that the bootcamp model is a fitting way to get people ready to work. The underhanded things Codesmith does pales in comparison to things that universities
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ 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.
u/da8BitKid wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Bro they sell shovels, shitty shovels, for whatever gold rush is going on. It use to be software dev now it's ai. Bootcamps have a limited scope, but why would I hire someone from a bootcamp now their experienced candidates with better credentials?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ 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.
u/ecto-2 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Why do you care so much about CodeSmith? Shouldn’t you be happy they aren’t directly competing with your business now?
u/michaelnovatireplied·· 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."
u/michaelnovati wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
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. Fo
u/michaelnovatireplied·· 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.
u/Frosty_Square6926 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think that's a bit harsh. It doesn't look that bad to me. Looks like a pretty standard modern marketing site. It may not be perfect but nothing obviously broken. Having minor alignment issues, inconsistent spacing etc. is very common even with major companies. Also, I don't thi
u/michaelnovatireplied·· 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 same lawsuit alleges that it took Codesmith 6 months to provide accounting and ownership information because they needed a forensic accountant to figure it all out.
And this great guy sends me a LinkedIn message out of nowhere telling that he has taught "1M+ students".
A former staff member told me confidentially that 'Will's \[lies\] will be their downfall' and while I have no evidence Will intentionally lied to the person, it's just like insane to me that this person was given so much leeway because he talks a good talk.
Regarding the website, agree to disagree, but there are 10 issues that at Facebook would warrant emergency drop everything fixes and maybe my bar is just very high?
u/Frosty_Square6926 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think that's a bit harsh. It doesn't look that bad to me. Looks like a pretty standard modern marketing site. It may not be perfect but nothing obviously broken. Having minor alignment issues, inconsistent spacing etc. is very common even with major companies. Also, I don't thi
u/michaelnovatireplied·· 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.
u/TheWhitingFish wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yet again, Mikey is on it
u/michaelnovatireplied·
u/Frosty_Square6926 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I have a lot I could say on each of your points, but it would probably turn into a wall of text here. But more importantly, I don't think going back and forth in a public thread is all that productive, even with the best intentions.
If you're open to it, I can DM you when I get
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah happy to DM, I've always been open to hearing all sides and have had numerous discussions.
I also have dozens and dozens of emails with the Codesmith staff discussing things in private. "Like hey your data is inconsistent and mathematically wrong" and often got no response. I spoke to their current CEO the most and did a call with her about how we could work together more productively, but when she completely flipped the narrative in that blog, I'm done... I can't trust these people whatsoever and a bunch of former staff who can't speak because of various reasons have witnessed similar things working there, so I'm just incredibly frustrated.
Not a single person other than their current CEO has told me Will is a trustworthy person. The arguments I have are people attacking my motivations and never actual counters to a dozen people calling Will a liar, unreliable, flaky, controlling, withholding of information, etc...
u/michaelnovati wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
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
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Here is a list of the problems to show that i'm not being sarcastic. You could feed this into AI and fix all of these in an hour.
This doesn't include CSX.
1. Footers inconsistent across site, one says 2025, one says 2026
2. Alignment in 2026 footer is not centered properly
3. Header, hover on the final item in each list has no radius and bleeds onto the page
4. Home -> Join Us -> Train Your Team -> Enterprise -> Enquire -> hello@codesmith email. Felt like I was going in circles.
5. Programs say "more dates available" but the other dates are the exact same ones in the header I clicked from
6. The dates make no sense and Jun 1 should be July 1
7. Median Salary & Employment Rate overflows in one box, inconsistent
8. It looks like their loan providers is gone but now the payment options have a gap missing a block that looks weird
9. The Terms and Privacy policy are dated 2018 but the content file is labeled 2022, which is still 4 years out of date. This is like 5 problems and is legally problematic.
10. Graduate impact & outcomes is like overflowing into a column when it looks meant to be two column
11. Links to subreddit Codesmith claimed is independent and not affiliated, the subreddit isn't maintained either
12. Super inconsistent styling of the Federal page makes it look sketchy and unofficial. These were done by different Upwork contractors?
13. Forms are all over the place: on site, Hubspot, Airtable, reduces credibility.
14. Numerous email blocked PDF resources have the PDF in the HTML so it's not really an email block.
15. Email blocks don't disclose permission to contact for marketing purposes, a legal requirement.
16. Our vision has misaligned section
17. A decade of Codesmith overflows and is partially unreadable
18. All priori collaborators are from 2022 and earlier, many from 7+ years ago.
19. Many team members don't work there anymore, can be misleading if you knowingly keep them up for appearances while removing some and not others - intent to misled
20. Regulatory information is out of date and doesn't have the latest links legally required.
21. Curriculum doc almost all of the staff are no longer at Codesmith for 1+ year.
22. Sitemap contains a number of Alumni events not visible on the website.
23. Events & workshops pills overflow
24. Some blogs have code blocks rendered as text that look amateurish
25. Pricing block on AI course is vertical instead of horizontal
26. AI FAQs are not centered.
u/TheWhitingFish wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yet again, Mikey is on it
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Wow hats off to you... "Top 1% commenter" and almost all of your comments are harassing me...
u/ongrabbits wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It seems to me that you know the ins and outs of Codesmith very well but why Codesmith specifically and not other bootcamps?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
The first bootcamp I dove into was Lambda School and its founder but once journalists published it was less interesting.
I have gathered lighter info on a dozen bootcamps but nothing interesting caught my eye.
Codesmith all started when I interviewed two engineers and they were lying through their teeth about their engineering jobs (that were 3 week projects at Codesmith) and then starting poking around and uncovering this ecosystem.
The second I starting poking around and asking questions I got this attack mob on me (which was later tied to a leader of Codesmith asking people to post on Reddit and go after my questions and observations).
Instead of being intimidated or bullied I launched an investigation that I've been spending now four years on, professionally asking people questions, watching tons of YouTube videos, collecting a lot of evidence, reading corporate fillings, lawsuits, etc...
And it's the most incredible story. The more I dig, the more crazy wild accusations come flying at me and just makes me dig more. Like being accused of "stalking" someone for reviewing their Reddit comment history as a moderator and pointing out bad past behavior.
u/michaelnovati wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Here is a list of the problems to show that i'm not being sarcastic. You could feed this into AI and fix all of these in an hour.
This doesn't include CSX.
1. Footers inconsistent across site, one says 2025, one says 2026
2. Alignment in 2026 footer is not centered properly
u/michaelnovatireplied·
https://preview.redd.it/b84chibn67xg1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=28e5d01abdf4aacc183b5817b2edd8aaf7fea3ab
Am I being trolled? This is the primary homepage since I posted this comment?
u/Low-Oil7883 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
People say bootcamps failed but really the market changed. The ones surviving are either niche or enterprise focused now. If someone mainly wants strong backend fundamentals Boot dev seems closer to that path than paying huge money for a brand trying to become a consulting firm.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Well bootcamps basically gave you a $50 course with human accountability and feedback an d then charged you $10,000.
That was worth it when the accountability drastically increased the likelihood of finishing, the feedback made sure you actually learned, and the network helped you actually placed.
The market destroys the last one.
So a $50 course vs a 100X cost comes down to if you need to finish the course and learn.
If you are learning for learning's sake, $50 course.
If you really need to upskill or something without a job guarantee, a more expensive option could make sense.
u/fsjay723 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
They are pivoting to sectors where they can get revenue to stay afloat without closing up shop like most bootcamps. I praise them for that, what else do you want them to do?
No one’s hiring and layoffs everywhere they gotta do what they gotta do. lol
Jeez, does it make you fee
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Well the "leadership" has minimal AI experience. Of the three people: one has product experience, one has like no tech experience for 10+ years, and one has never worked full time for a real tech company.
Like who the heck would hire tis group of people to overhaul AI at a Fortune 500 company?
I'm not trying to be mean but just realistic.
Like lots of companies ask me to do talks and stuff because I'm one of the highest output engineers in the world but I'm not the right person to overhaul AI tooling at a Fortune 500 company... I know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at.
I think they are going to die even faster with this pivot in my opinon.
You don't get points for good intentions in this industry.
You don't get a trophy for trying.
You don't build credibility by paying somebody on Upwork to write Twitter content for you.
Their homepage hero right now that seemed that changed on Friday is an illegible mess, like something is wrong there in my opinion.
People make up all kinds of bull shit reasons why I push them so much.
Here's the reason: TOUGH LOVE. Will Sentance had so much potential. He captured an audience with a teaching style. He cared about every Codesmith graduate. I have been trying to help for years giving feedback to turn that POTENTIAL into a lasting success story.
Even with threats and harassing porn subscriptions being done in my name, I'm not giving up because of that screwed up potential.
But it might be too late now, he fucked it all up because he listened to the wrong people instead of hearing me out.
u/TheWhitingFish wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yet again, Mikey is on it
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
What's the defense for an instructor telling their students in an official career class to lie on their resumes because Codesmith will back them up?
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith)
u/fsjay723 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Just because no one wants to take your bootcamp, doesn’t make yours any better lol
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Debunked, read this https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith
u/michaelnovati wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
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. Fo
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Looks like their individual programs are toast? The SEO tags now say:
TITLE: Enterprise AI Engineering Training \& Workforce Transformation | Codesmith
DESCRIPTION: Build AI-ready engineering teams with Codesmith. Trusted by leading organizations and awarded a $118M US Treasury contract, we train engineers to design, build, and scale AI systems faster.
Zero mention of their normal programs - 100% enterprise.