by daniel_jelinko | 2025-10-04 07:36:09+00:00
I participated in the first cohort in January 2025 and have been using SolveIt ever since. I would like to share some thoughts about my experience of the course, platform and the community of makers & users.

Explaining SolveIt is hard

How do you explain to someone who's never written a line of code what programming feels like? When I'd visit my father-in-law, he'd ask me at breakfast what I was going to do that day. Every time I would give him the same answer: I will stare at the same blue screen all day long like I have been doing on every average workday since I started programming ~15 years ago. It's become our little family joke, but it's also true - it's difficult to explain to someone who has never done it.

The question is what does that blue screen work actually involve? What does programming feel like? How do you live through it? What is your experience when you solve problems - is it painful or agreeable? Do you finish knowing more about the domain of a problem you tackled, or did you just get something working fast and hope it wouldn't collapse on you later?

The SolveIt experience is similarly hard to explain to someone who hasn't tried it. What's interesting is that using the SolveIt method has had positive effects on all these areas - how my work feels, how well I understand what I build, and the quality of what I produce.

For my first bigger, work related project in SolveIt I built an annotation interface for YouTube dialogue transcripts for documentary movie footage classification. I'd used Angular before but not FastHTML and HTMX. I had a working app in production within two weeks going from 0->users annotating, which might not sound very impressive in this new agentic era. But when using SolveIt right, the result isn't just working code, it's code that you know, and most importantly it's a much better understanding of your initial problem and the potential solutions/technologies to solve it.

Plus, the SolveIt approach made me examine each component individually - what it represents, what it means for my system, how it could integrate more broadly into our organization. That exploration led to something far more general than my initial annotation app: now we are using it for browsing/editing dataframes through a UI, where columns and cells can have different templates/layout, edit history and several other features I hadn't even thought of initially. The exploration phase took longer, but I gained a foundation I understand deeply and can build on. For core business problems, that knowledge living in your head matters a lot.

My only problem at the time was git integration - I wanted my work synced with my codebase and manual copy pasting was too much friction. This has been resolved since: I have my git repos accessible from SolveIt and AFAIK you can serve apps directly from the platform without needing to deploy it (though I haven't tested this functionality yet).

Cult disclaimer

I was surprised reading through this thread by comments about religious cults, paid marketing campaigns, and fake testimonials. It's true that I registered to Hacker News today just to share my experience with SolveIt. I am a real person though and have not received any money for writing this post.

Instead, for several years now I've been learning from Jeremy Howard and the answer.ai team through their free resources - the fast.ai courses, talks, podcasts, and open source projects. Hamel Husain's work on nbdev also had a huge impact on how I work. All of this is available for free to anyone interested in learning. I hope that many others will discover them and SolveIt. I believe many successful projects, businesses and open source solutions will grow on the SolveIt ground, the same way it happened with fast.ai courses.

On $$$ concerns: I paid $200 for the first prototype cohort. I thought it was worth much more than that - the course itself, plus unlimited 11+ month platform access (included Claude most recent model), plus the community discussions where I learned from other practitioners how they tackled specific problems from very diverse domains. When cohort 2 was announced, I knew I was gonna sign up even before I knew the price. The ideas you take and friends you make in these communities are priceless.