Right, think of it like the IRS put $118M into a special bank account, and that account can be used to "buy things" over 5 years. Each time they want to buy something, the 5 recipients can offer their product. Like if they want 100 cars, each of the 5 can pitch the car they offer and the IRS chooses one.
If there is money left in the bank at the end it goes back and the account is closed.
A BPA is a "blanket purchase agreement", which means the IRS budgeted/allocated $118M to a large umbrella of AI training/upskilling/hiring.
There are 5 companies that received this BPA.
When the IRS has a specific task/contract within this budget, e.g. "a 10 week AI bootcamp for 20 level 31 engineers" then they create a task with a price and the 5 companies can compete/propose solutions and one is chosen for that task.
I agree if those numbers are correct that it's shady, I think the problem is that people aren't spending any money to attend. I fully agree that "time is money" but legally I doubt Gauntlet will get the same scrutiny that Lambda did.
I think if that many people lost their jobs or didn't get one they would flood reviews to warn people and it will stop working?
I think BloomTech shut down effectively, and Gauntlet has traction. It's entirely free and the jobs are very high paying. But it's not perfect either. The thing is when you have a problem and you pay $0, it's hard to have "damages", so their model absolutely lets them experiment and iterate at the pace Austen Allred wants but without having students as upset if they don't have a good experience.
I think it comes down alignment.
Codesmith has like no staff left and none of them have extensive AI experience. They hired random people on Upwork to manage this thing, from marketing to program management to working on the contracts. I don't see students in 2026. I don't see placements in 2026. The "CIRR Audited Outcomes" haven't been updated this year, and CIRR has not responded to why. Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy. A 2024-2025 lawsuit said that their financials required six months of forensic accounting to assemble and could not be provided on demand. Codesmith's AI curriculum is minimal and created by recent alumni. I'm not an expert but I would guess they would have trouble with the most basic government audit.
Additionally, the AI "Lead Engineer" on the IRS stuff is a full time engineer at a top tier bank. I also suspect that's problematic to have them on c…
I worked on some of the most disturbing internal tools at Facebook you can imagine, the hardest of the hard, the infinite shades of grey.
It re-programmed my brain to separate feelings from objective, provable facts.
You are incapable of doing that.
The fundamental facts are fully on my side.
Whether you like me or not is a matter of taste and many brilliant people like me, and many don't.
It's irrelevant.
If you want to debate the facts, I'm down.
If you can't accept the facts you will only cause your own downfall.
NEWS: First wave of contracts totalling $4.4M under the $118M IRS BPA were awarded to Fedstack, Gauntlet AI, Fearless, and Sokat. Codesmith with no reported contracts.
Details below. Interesting to see Gauntlet AI take the 10-week training program.
# 1. Fedstack (Smoothstack): $1,623,840.00
* **Task Order ID:** `2032L226F00064`
* Fedstack secured the highest-value award to scale highly governed training pipelines that transition existing personnel into specialized AI engineering roles.
* [https://orangeslices.ai/fedstack-secures-department-of-the-treasury-artificial-intelligence-engineer-workforce-development-task/](https://orangeslices.ai/fedstack-secures-department-of-the-treasury-artificial-intelligence-engineer-workforce-development-task/)
# 2. Gauntlet AI (BloomTech): $1,420,654.80
* **Task Order ID:** `2032L226F00062`
* Gauntlet AI received funding to deploy intensive 10-week…
I agree with comments, that this is Reddit drama and not "theory of Reddit". The blog post this was based on was already posted here like 8 months ago as well.
Anyways, people can share their opinions and I'm here to add in anothr other side of the same story that is missing in this "theory": [https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith)
When I criticized other programs, their leaders reached out to me, we talked and sorted things out. We didn't become friends, but it mattered.
Codesmith never reached out for years and the first time a Codesmith leader reached out to me in 2024 he said "With regards to your posts re Codesmith, I generally don’t have any issue with them"
So WTF... that implies you do not have a problem with my Reddit activity.
Like I can't deal with reading between the lines, passive aggressive messaging, people saying things they don't mean to mean something else.
I have received numerous bug bounties for finding security vulnerabilities thank you very much and participated in organizing Red Team security drills.
The situation is complicated over 4 years and you jumped in at the "everything is burning to the ground" stage. I look really bad, Codesmith looks really bad. There are bad actors going after me left right and center. There are bad actors who went after Codesmith over the years.
And yes, if you were here for 4 years you would see all of the people I recommended go to Codesmith, because every bootcamp has flaws and if you are a good fit for Codesmith you should go to Codesmith and I tried to make that happen.
I'm very bad at communicating in general, but you are seeing a sliver of this thing.
Reddit shut down all the manipulation as you saw, and now the people went to X.
Sarcasm and trolling, you haven't once actually tried to discuss the substance, not once. All of your posts are attacks, trolling, etc...
For example, I had a private conversation with someone about what's a reasonable timeframe and rollout plan to rollout a new website and am I being too hard on them or am I not being hard enough. Both sides. Good discussion. That helps be understand where people are at.
Your commments insults and trolling and your +20 fake bullshit comment has been Reddit correct back to +2.
👏👏👏 stop spreading fake news.
https://preview.redd.it/146p6q4yg56h1.png?width=1636&format=png&auto=webp&s=3f8b5e85e691fbe1c2956a5bd1f72e1c23051f00
Again, what's with these trolling attacks that don't actually address what I say and why do these people only come out on Codesmith posts.
I never have these discussion when I criticize other programs. The CEO's usually reach out, we talk and everything is good.
Codesmith community is so weird. "Powerclap" and "smile" camera on in every session. If you display negatively you get a 1-1 'attitude correction' with an instruction.
But on the outside, if you say anything bad about Codesmith, the wrath of all-mighty power shall be thrust upon you to shut you up.
All false. Stop making Reddit a place of untrustworthy garbage and focus on the truth.
By the way, I guess you aren't an engineer or didn't have a solid computer science education, but monitoring sitemaps is a common thing. Any AI tool can even do in on a schedule without any code or any service.
You sound just like those dozens of accounts that got banned from Reddit.
You are experiencing what I've experienced for four years: I don't understand why people downvote the truth. I can guess ideas, but just like I don't want to people to make assumptions about me, I try to not make assumptions about other people. If I do based on the evidence in front of me, I will correct and change it if new evidence comes to light.
Like people might not like you calling out an obvious contradiction: someone calling themselves a Karpathy-like AI researcher when they have never actually published any research. They might not like you rubbing salt in a wound that Will Sentance said he was publishing a book last year that doesn't seem to have ever come out.
Like calling out someone who repeatedly warps the truth, with public sources, former staff, and dozens of examples, might be mean.
But if you are Will Sentance, a public figure, who signs his DM's '1,000,000 students…
I'll try to summarize then, I do agree that I haven't clearly articulated all of it publicly:
1. I interviewed Codesmith grads who were lying through their teeth and I got fascinated by it
2. When I started poking around people were cult-like devoted to Codesmith, which got me more interested
3. By asking questions a number of former staff and alumni reached out with telling me all kinds of crazy stuff going on there, which got me MORE interested
NOTE that through this time I was very supportive of them overall. The grads were solid, the outcomes were good. I recommended people go there. I recommended they ear the sausage. I was curious how the sausage was made.
NOTE also that people on the Codesmith side thought I was a competitor trying to steal business and I also spent some energy explaining the differences and clarifying.
4. I started piecing together how the sausage was made,…
No, it's totally fine to call out my behavior, if you also discuss the substance and give me a chance to explain where I'm coming from.
For example this post alone I have what like 30 comments. That doesn't mean that I commented about Codesmith "every day for a month". But some people judged me based on Lars's fake conclusions.
Or are saying it does? This post is evidence that I talked about Codesmith "every day for a whole month" according to the Lars Lofgren methodology.
I have been very much on top of Codesmith, and for good reason, and you can think I'm too on top of them and that I'm correct.
But calling me obsessive and therefore I'm wrong is an idiotic argument.
I'm a single-account non-anonymous profile dealing with four years of dozens of fake, then Reddit-wide banned accounts going after me for talking about Codesmith.
I've explicitly stated that I'm calling them out. I supported Codesmith for years, and I've been commenting on the reality of their decline, and they turned that into publicly blaming me for causing $9M in declines. So my only goal is for people to get the facts straight.
You can see here [https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith) how I provided a list of 39 pro-Codesmith accounts that were Reddit-wide banned and have been dealing with this for years.
The problem is I have one account, one real name and you can see my content. It's not easy to add up the cumulative behavior of all those banned accounts.
I saw your other comment that you aren't familiar with the coding bootcamp industry or the sub, so I would recommend doing some research on all sides
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith)
You see how it's back down to 3 now... that's called Reddit manipulation fixing. Unless it went from 1 to 12 with 12 views and then 12 to 3 with 40 more views. Which is statistically extremely unlikely given that all the other comments on this branch fluctuated +/-1 .
You are an idiot if you think this isn't weird or you are just harassing me with gaslighting.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
So you have zero affiliation with Codesmith, staff, former staff, alumni, etc... and you are just a person that happens to comment a huge percentage of comments on Codesmith related content.
I covered that case, and you could be normal Redditor who happened upon here, and then is being used for manipulation.
Maybe some people do, but this is vote manipulation. When I was moderator there was maybe one or two times I saw this on content about two other bootcamps, yet it happens on every controversial Codesmith post.
There is no evidence that Codesmith themselves are doing it, they have denied that. But someone or some people are and there are unique patterns here.
I similarly get downvoted to like -10 and then an hour later it's wiped back out to like +3.
And no one else has that happen to them.
Maybe these people feel justified in their actions, but all it looks like is suppressing negative facts instead of actually disproving them.
And that makes Reddit AI algorithms think Codesmith is very sketchy.
I honestly haven't seen this pattern in other places on Reddit either because like this sub has such little activity relative to other places these strategies might be less obvious.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
You realize all day long the counts jump +10 in minutes and then Reddit cleans it up later. I've had numerous notifications of comments on this post and I click through and the account is already banned and the comment is gone.
I will stay here with my one account, and let Codesmith destroy it's own reputation for not trying to stop this behavior.
Right, from an account with "65 contributions", and I count at least a dozen comments (from two threads alone) that are on Codesmith-Novati posts with no other involvement in this sub.
If you are a real and independent person, debate me with integrity, not with sketchy accounts.
I've been harassed by dozens of similar looking accounts for years that were banned/deleted and I need more integrity to take someone seriously.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I don't want to share the raw link because there is A LOT Of stuff on there. Seems like he hires all his lawyers, interior designers, all the people for their IRS thing.... you can try to find it on your own, it's all public and not hard to find.
I don't really understand why the IRS would pay Codesmith a bunch of money if all these people are just Upwork contractors that ANYONE could hire for $40 an hour. Maybe that's how the government works, but we need more integrity and value creation and not people selling off the work of Upwork contractors with a huge markup to the government.
Yeah I'm just posting receipts for everyone else reading it with all the evidence, I added a screenshot of the Upwork job he has to try to get someone to do the research for him too.
I've had enough of this guy spewing out lies and manipulation and making millions of dollars doing it and as a prominent public figure, he has to be accountable to the public.