Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Great lessons
- Thank youby djoume
- Still building my new "approve" button skill.by postalrat
- > 10000+ developers on this
this seems false given this just launched?
- This is true. A first version of the app was launched 2 years ago.(Android only, manually created courses, webdev only).by djoume
- at this point building is not the challenge fighting bugs and vulnerabilities is the challenge. try getdebug.dev it has a free cli tools to find, fix and enable you ship your code without someone taking advantage of it.by nutifafa
- it has the guide at https://github.com/getdebug-ai/cliby nutifafa
- If you need to use an agent then you might as well just work SRS into your harness using something like https://srs.voxos.ai/by Falimonda
- I can understand that you want to make money from this, but hiding significant amounts of content behind 13 dollars a month feels a bit much. Especially when you acknowledge that most of that content is LLM generated. It's not just the advanced courses, it looks like it's pretty much all of them
Cool app though! I love the idea of coding Duolingo. But I think the price is going to turn most people off. Another problem I see is that it's not really clear how this is that much different from other similar apps out there.
by royal__ - Thanks for the feedback. What similar app are you thinking of?by djoume
- This is super cool and definitely something I can relate to. In fact, I recently built Reps, a daily coding puzzle, to help fight “skill rot” as you say. Try it out at https://reps.zander.wtf and let me know what you think.by mrmartineau
- Very nice! I went with a different approach so that 1) I could make it usable on a phone and 2) It could work with any programming language/frameworkby djoume
- The copy on your website is kind of confusing imo
> fata builds the full-stack fundamentals to lead a coding agent through frontend, backend, and the technical design that holds up in production.
"Fata builds" sounds like it does the work, not like it trains you how to do the work. With how many "AI does the work for you" promises out there, it's confusing terminology
Anyways best of luck I suppose. I would rather run a drill press through my hand than use AI agents to write code for me, so I'm not your target audience
- Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated, will fix the copy.by djoume
- This is very, very cool! Super impressed by what you've built.
As a non-programmer who is now doing a lot of vibe coding for myself these days (and feeling very scared about which of my vibe coded things will just randomly break one day haha...) I feel like what I'm missing isn't necessary language syntax skills, but rather the higher-level planning/organization/architecture capabilities that a seasoned software engineer acquires over years of seeing what scales vs. breaks in the real world.
Is there anything you would recommend I learn to start acquiring that knowledge (aka. the higher level knowledge a "vibe-coder" who doesn't manually code by hand would need)? I'll try out your clean architecture course, but would love to see more along those lines :)
Obviously I know nothing will replace real world SWE experience, but anything that could plug that gap even a tiny bit would be helpful and is something I'm willing to invest in.
by fabled-out - Thank you. Try out this course and let me know what you think
https://fata.app/courses/archClean
For me I found that I learn best when I have a concrete use case.
by djoume - You can change the output style of your AI agents, have them use a more learning and “tutor” style to improve your skills.
The coach could look at transcripts of old sessions and come up with real lessons for you to improve. Ask for book or article recommendations.
by Atotalnoob - Have you tried to understand the code that's being produced?
That'll go a long ways to actually helping your vibe coded thing not break, and also will make it easier to change things in ways that you actually want changed instead of throwing it into the black box again hoping for the best.
by soperj - I can envision a way or two of avoiding AI skill rot... which could involve just doing the work by yourself actually xD
I hope you factor in the time you spend doing that spaced repetition thing when you evaluate your AI productivity boost...
by jraph - I do ~10 minutes per day, wouldn't really make a difference in my AI productivity boost calculation (which 10-20% boost BTW)by djoume
- Coming at this as someone who has stepped away from coding more than once for multiple-year long stints due to various career choices - I think the concern of "skill rot" is overblown.
I stopped writing C++ professionally in the early 2010's. I came back to it in the early 2020's and it was extremely easy to pick up. Less like riding a bike, more like driving a car. The car got better over the last 10 years, but it still takes a bit of time to fully meld with the machine. The skills didn't rot, they just fell behind, and catching up wasn't a big deal.
I think the only "skill rot" people are facing today when coding by hand vs by agent is that you know you're doing something the hard way when you know there is another path of least resistance available - and that creates internal resistance to doing it the hard way. It's a mental block, not skill rot.
The one area I do find myself questioning is that my low level tech skills aren't growing - I'm building bigger projects that do more stuff across more areas, and as a result I'm touching lots of new technologies from a birds eye view and directing the agents to do stuff with them. I'm not personally gaining that experience of using those technologies, whereas if I were doing things the old way I would be deep in the weeds and have to know them in depth. But if I were doing things the old way I probably wouldn't be building such ambitious projects as a solo dev either.
IMO it's more like digging out the foundation with shovels vs using an excavator. You don't lose the shoveling skill by using the excavator, but you sure feel like a chump using a shovel when there's an excavator parked and ready next to the job site.
- do you have any tips or strategies on picking up c++ after a long break?by stbtrax
- Maybe it only applies to people at the top of their game; pro atheletes and musicians need regular practice, the rest of us can use most of our skills without that.by axus
- This differs from my own experience with C++. I went from language-lawyer level knowledge (in some parts) while using it heavily (at work, at play and answering Stack Overflow questions on it) to forgetting quite basic stuff after a few years of no use at all. This was all before LLMs were on the scene. With that said, relearning is much faster than learning the first time, as the basic "shape" of things is still there in my mind.
In my defence, even Stroustrup acknowledges the language is too big and complicated, and it's continually getting bigger.
- Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization." This is a relatively new fable invented by those that have participated in ritualistic interview hazing. Imo, there are, broadly speaking, two types of engineers: computer scientists, and programmers.
Computer scientists do science. The end result is a new algorithm or theorem, and they work with lots of math, proof systems, formal languages, and so on. This is a profoundly creative and collaborative process.
Programmers build products for end-users. The end result is the user experience, the bottom line, stars on Github, or whatever. This is also a process that constantly needs feedback, from teammates and from clients.
These are broad categories and sometimes they overlap: an operating system or database engineer might do a bit of both, depending on the hardware targeted or on various constraints. Sometimes you need to be a bit clever to get to your product goal.
This cleverness has nothing to do with memorizing keywords or solving interview gotcha questions. This cleverness can't be augmented by AI, and it can't be rotted by AI: it's something that's innate to people. Their internal curiosity just happens to manifest in the context of engineering because they love the craft.
In many ways, it's like reading a book. You can't "make someone" enjoy reading, some people are just boring and uncurious. In many ways, I feel that people that are threatened by AI are like this. AI is an incredible tool, but it feels like an autistic junior engineer. Sure, it might have memorized more library names or more syntax or can reference some little-known fact, but it fails to understand basic data flow. It doesn't grasp ergonomics, ease of use, etc., etc.
A tool like fata is great if you want to be an AI, but it won't turn you into a good engineer.
by dvt - Focusing on your first point: Memorization isn't everything. But it's not nothing either.
Sometimes it's nice to be able to just bang out some code without looking everything up. IDEs in an IDE-friendly language make this awareness accessible in the immediate frame, but don't necessarily help with having a mental menu of possibilities to choose from.
That said: I find spaced repetition utterly crushing, so I only use it very sparingly.
- Sadly the "ritualistic interview hazing" is just reality how you can get ordinary job today. Usually it have nothing to do with the job itself, it almost always could be solved by just ordinary dialog but for some reason. I don't know if it was someone from HR or some proactive manager thought it would be a wise idea to do this type of tests.
I just started to perceive it as an contest full of stupid useless semi relevant bullshit questions when you win the job. I'm kinda invested in the hate, because I'm currently attending interviews.
by hsuduebc2 - Engineering creativity does not come from a blank slate.... people create by combining primitives like APIs, algorithms, patterns, debugging techniques, product constraints, performance constraints, user needs, and blah blah blah.
You can argue that a particular primitive is bad or overemphasized but the ida that real engineering has nothing to do with repetition, memory etc is wrong.
- Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree that people have tendencies towards certain interests, I can't remember a time where I wasn't interested about computers, even long before I had access to one.
That being said, people are also inspired by other people or by products, and there are ways to make the learning more effective.
No tools is going to turn you into a good engineer, fata makes it easier to practice regularly and it's that practice that will make you improve your skills
by djoume - > Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization."
Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems.
> This cleverness can't be augmented by AI, and it can't be rotted by AI: it's something that's innate to people
I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise. I just reject the idea that some people are just incapable of original thought. They just didn't get the circumstances to flourish.
by RealityVoid