Introducing Solve It With Code

Something interesting happens when people start using AI for coding. At first, it feels magical - like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix suddenly knowing kung fu. You can create an app in 15 minutes that would have taken weeks before.

But then reality hits: you need to make changes, add features, fix bugs. The magic starts to fade, and many hit a wall they can’t get past.

I want to share with you something that, for me at least, has turned out to be an effective antidote: the "solveit method", a modern approach to building software, writing, solving problems, and learning, inspired by George Pólya’s How to Solve It and the education tradition of learning by doing.

We're running a 5 week course teaching this approach starting Nov 3rd, and are providing access to our new software platform which supports it.

Tl;dr—what's included:

If you'd like to join us, sign up here. Or read on, to find out more about us, what we're doing, and why…

You may already know about my work at fast.ai. Eight years ago, Rachel Thomas and I launched fast.ai with a mission to democratize artificial intelligence. We believed AI would become one of the most significant technologies in history, and, if widely distributed, felt like it could empower people all around the world to create anything they could imagine. But if only a small elite understood it, we worried it could lead to inequality.

Back before the dawn of the AI revolution, we created the world's first certificate in deep learning here in 2016, and invented the first LLM. With my students in 2018 we built the world's fastest model.

After teaching so many people to use AI, I've discovered something important: there's a completely new way to combine AI with coding (and writing, and learning, and…), and I want to share it with you. We ran a small preview with the first 1000 students a year ago (many of whom were already extremely successful AI practitioners)—here's some examples of what we heard:

Dr. Daniel Plate, a Professor of English, said that "the Solveit approach provides a hedge against AI tools that totally replace the human creator. [It] comes out of a philosophy of AI that fits with a deep commitment to craft and attention to detail."

Daniel Jelinko, an ML engineer at rebuz.fr, told us that "Where Solveit makes all the difference is that it doesn't just help you reach your initial goal, but it helps you better understand the problem you are tackling and makes solving it more enjoyable. As a result, it gives you more confidence to aim higher and take on more challenging problems."

Jeffrey Roach, a Manager and Machine Learning Scientist at System1, explained "You avoiding wasting time wrestling with abstract issues or fighting the LLM to give you quality output. The whole process empowers you to learn and build products at a pace far faster than you'd expect."

Chris Thomas, an AI consultant and solutions developer with over 25 years of programming experience, wrote a detailed review in The Human is the Agent: How SolveIt Changed My Programming Journey After 25 Years.

Over the last year we've been working on improving it further, and we've opened this course to you all—you can sign up here.

The one person that's made a big positive impact on my life is Eric Ries. You would know him as the creator of The Lean Startup (which introduced ideas like The Minimum Viable Product into the world), founder of the Long Term Stock Exchange, and much more. He is, in my opinion, the world's foremost thinker on startup building.

Eric & I created Answer.AI together, the company of which fast.ai is now a part. We realised that the Lean Startup method and the Solveit method are actually two sides of the same coin. They are both about dramatically shortening iteration cycles, and getting and reacting to real information at each step. With Solveit, we take this idea right into the weeds of building, writing, and solving.

Eric will be teaching lessons in the course about how to write using the Solveit method, and how to incorporate what we are learning into building successful businesses. He's finishing his new book as we speak, which is all about how to create successful organizations that stick to the founders' mission and values for the long term.

Members of the course will have the opportunity to be amongst the first in the world to read the new book, and we'll be showing how the Solveit method can help get the most out of reading. Folks in the US can also get a free physical copy (once released).

Eric and I would love to meet you on November 3. You can sign up here.