[HN Gopher] Launching Solveit - an antidote to AI fatigue
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Launching Solveit - an antidote to AI fatigue
Author : eries
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-10-02 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.answer.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.answer.ai)
| jph00 wrote:
| Hi all - Jeremy Howard from Answer.AI here. Really excited to
| share with you all what we've learned over the past year about
| how to work with AI in a way that's entirely human-centered.
|
| Whilst most folks seem focused on how to remove humans from the
| loop entirely and make AIs do all the work, we've concentrated
| 100% on how to make humans part of the loop in a way that makes
| us more and more capable and engaged.
|
| I've enjoyed building and using our tool, "solveit", for the last
| year, and do basically all my coding, writing, reading, research,
| etc in it nowadays. I use small fast iterative steps and work to
| maximize my learning at each step.
| casparvitch wrote:
| I'm slightly confused. From your comment I expected an AI chat
| tool, but solveit appears to be more a class?
| jph00 wrote:
| It's both! We built a new platform designed to be a good
| place for using the approach we've designed. So it's a
| course, plus access to the platform.
|
| Sorry it is a bit confusing tbh!
| eries wrote:
| Hey everyone, Eric Ries here. solveit is the AI environment I
| personally have been using every day for months, not just for
| code but for writing and research, too.
|
| it's solved all the problems and frustrations I've had with both
| vibecoding and the limitations of the chatbot interface for doing
| deep work that requires concentration + the ability to understand
| the artifacts you are producing
|
| and, as a special bonus, people in this course will get a sneak
| preview of the new book I'm working on. we're going to use it
| both to teach some of the concepts from it (on how to create
| mission-driven long-term companies) and how to use solveit for
| longform writing projects
|
| happy to answer any questions here, for folks that want to learn
| more,
|
| Eric
| jph00 wrote:
| (For those that don't recognise the name, Eric is the creator
| of The Lean Startup, and also founded the Long Term Stock
| Exchange. He's the co-founder of Answer.AI, which has built the
| solveit platform, and which fast.ai is not part of.)
| mritchie712 wrote:
| do you have a video of someone using it?
| erikgaas wrote:
| Here is a video showing off using solveit for creating a web
| app. https://youtu.be/DgPr3HVp0eg?t=3120 To reiterate other
| comments, this is more about the methodology than the tool,
| but it is fun to see the tool in action too.
| jph00 wrote:
| Thanks Erik - I've added that video to the article now.! :)
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| We also showed it as part of Hamel's course:
| https://x.com/HamelHusain/status/1956514524628127875
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPr3HVp0eg) which is a
| longer example of the tool in action
| waterproof wrote:
| I see a $400 price tag on a five week course. If it takes 5 weeks
| to learn how to use your product, I am skeptical that it has
| legs.
|
| Side note: supposedly this is the first cohort of this course, so
| how do you already have testimonials?
| jph00 wrote:
| As the post mentions, a year ago we did a trial of it, and have
| been working with that group of 1000 users since then.
|
| The course is about a methodology, not a product. It's the
| ideas Eric Ries and I have been working on for decades. 5 weeks
| is a crash course that can only touch on the ideas. And it
| covers learning data structures and algorithms, foundations of
| web programming, system administration, startup creating, and
| much more.
|
| It's really a rapid "how do to <x> the solveit way" for a
| variety of x. Each of those x is likely to become a full course
| in the future.
| edgemaester wrote:
| It's not a course on how to learn how to use the product. It's
| a course on how to think and solve problems, which makes you
| more effective in using the platform.
| rapsacnz wrote:
| So the antidote to AI fatigue is... more AI?
| jph00 wrote:
| No, the first example shown doesn't use AI at all. The AI is an
| optional helper in the process, if needed/wanted.
| Diti wrote:
| The AI is an integral part of the platform. You won't go
| anywhere using Solveit if you don't let the LLM give you
| feedback.
|
| Sigh. I agree with the parent poster's sentiment.
| eries wrote:
| as someone who uses solveit all the time, this has not been
| my experience
| noduerme wrote:
| I read most of this before understanding that I wasn't reading
| about some new agent or IDE or something, I was reading a sales
| pitch for a coding course for would-be vibe coders, with AI
| training wheels in the form of ... a dialog box to talk to an
| LLM.
|
| I should have noticed the camp counselor / cultish / tedx vibes,
| throwin around REPL and feedback loops. I feel that it's somewhat
| misleading to present this as some amazing self-building
| _software_ or server platform here, and bury the lede that what
| 's being sold is an experimental tutoring method. It's almost
| like those "I built an AI agent that builds AI agents" posts,
| only instead of selling the sixty lines of python, it's selling a
| set of lectures that goes with them.
| sho_hn wrote:
| In other words, a grift.
|
| Same conclusion.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I'm sure I'm not the only one confused by this, but can you give
| details on why you decided that a course was necessary to learn
| this new way of working with AI?
|
| Maybe it's more of a alpha thing, but with millions using
| chatbots every day, was it not possible to develop a UI?
|
| It's not just about adoption, who has the time to spend 5 weeks
| learning a new tool? Particularly when you're competing with the
| existing tools?
| jph00 wrote:
| The course is about a methodology, not a product. It's the
| ideas Eric Ries and I have been working on for decades. 5 weeks
| is a crash course that can only touch on the ideas. And it
| covers learning data structures and algorithms, foundations of
| web programming, system administration, startup creating, and
| much more.
|
| It's really a rapid "how do to <x> the solveit way" for a
| variety of x. Each of those x is likely to become a full course
| in the future.
|
| (We actually built the tool for ourselves, and only decided to
| make it publicly available when we realised how much it's
| helping us. We're a PBC so our mission is not entirely
| financial. We're not trying to compete with existing tools, but
| provide an alternative direction.)
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| We made the tool, and that will eventually be available on its
| own. But the method requires some discipline and 'unlearning'.
| It's very hard to show someone an AI tool and not have them
| treat it just like ChatGPT/Claude/... - that's the part that
| takes the time, and having a community of people working
| through different examples and case studies together is a lot
| more motivating for this than just staring at an empty prompt
| box :)
| sentrysapper wrote:
| dang. thought this was a service for people tired of reading
| about AI.
| eries wrote:
| in a way, it is
| hansmayer wrote:
| Without the intent of hijacking whatever it is you are trying to
| achieve: I've found the best antidote to the AI-fatigue is to
| rely less on it. There is no way I am going to spend my day, or
| my employees day for that matter in reviewing thousands of LoC of
| bad AI-slop. In my teams we've dialed it back to just consulting
| mode and asking suggestions,e.g. replacement for good old search,
| because once you ask the GenAI to write a few thousands of LoC
| for you, you're also abandoning a lot architecture decisions
| (which you then have to figure out ad-hoc again, when you do the
| review of the slop, or at the latest when you notice the "smart"
| tool has yet again put a secret in plaintext or something
| similar). So yeah, if you have the so-called AI-fatigue, just use
| less of the so-called AI.
| jph00 wrote:
| Absolutely right! Although I've found AI great for learning. It
| doesn't write my code for me, or my prose, or my devops
| scripts, but it's part of the process of me learning as I write
| them.
| erikgaas wrote:
| One thing I loved about the first solveit course was how create
| the community is. It goes back to fast.ai too, but everyone is
| super kind, smart, and has diverse backgrounds.
|
| We've captured a slice of that on our main site. Testimonials:
| https://solve.it.com/testimonials Some blog posts:
| https://solve.it.com/#showcases on the main page
|
| And on of the students even made a project dashboard page
| showcasing all the things everyone has built! https://solveit-
| project-showcase.pla.sh/
|
| He even blogged about it : )
| https://himalayanhacker.substack.com/p/how-i-built-solve-it-...
| edgemaester wrote:
| I've been using SolveIt for about a month and going through the
| previous cohort content. It's really hard to not to try to vomit
| out solutions and to go about something in a methodical way. It
| makes your work visible, maintainable and usable by others (and
| frankly yourself). It takes a lot of practice, but it is very
| much intangible and always in the process of becoming. If you
| want to focus on solving pretty much any problem, and a path to
| using AI effectively in any endeavor, then this is a really
| fulfilling path. You will find that there is more magic in AI
| than you suspect. Many praises to Jeremy and Johno and the
| SolveIt team. But don't take my word for it. I'm a fresh convert.
| Go check it out for yourself. It is subtle and requires nuance,
| so not for everyone.
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