This transcript provides a chronological record of announcements for the "How To Solve It With Code" (SIWC) course and its accompanying development environment, the "Solveit" platform, spanning from the initial experimental cohort launch in November 2024 through the announcement of its open, full-scale public relaunch in October 2025. The course emphasizes an iterative, human-in-control, AI-assisted problem-solving methodology ("Dialogue Engineering"), primarily utilizing Advent of Code (AoC) problems and the Python standard library. Announcements detail course logistics, community rules, platform feature updates (e.g., ShellSage, performance improvements, UI fixes), and important milestones, including the lifting of initial confidentiality rules and the successful transition to a new, scalable infrastructure for the second cohort.
Solve It With Code: Key Announcements and Course Development
11/26/24 (4:27 PM) Initial Setup and Security: The server begins. Immediately following, an announcement details that channel details were inadvertently leaked, leading to the creation of new, private channels (solvers, solveit-app, announcements).
11/26/24 (4:34 PM) Course Philosophy: SIWC focuses on solving Advent of Code (AoC) 2023 problems using a specific process, leveraging the Python standard library and AI (but warns against using AI as a calculator, emphasizing practice).
11/26/24 (4:36 PM) Community Guidelines (The Golden Rule): Members are asked to impress others with their desire to learn and help, not their knowledge. All server information must be kept confidential.
11/26/24 (4:40 PM) Solveit Platform: The course features two parts: the lessons/community and the proprietary "Solveit platform," a web app/REPL for code and LLM prompts designed for "dialog engineering."
11/26/24 (4:41 PM) Logistics: The first lessons are scheduled for Tuesday/Friday (US time), running for 3 weeks before a break in January. A full refund option is available within the first two weeks.
11/27/24 (5:59 AM) Post-Lesson 1 Update & Quota Warning: The HD recording is available. Crucially, students are warned to keep their disk usage significantly under 2GB to avoid volume deletion, as quotas are being implemented.
11/28/24 (10:06 PM) Platform Fixes: A new Solveit image is released with UI tweaks, including changes to message editing (single-click title bar) and fixes for browser freezing due to accidentally printing massive output logs (output truncation added).
12/2/24 (9:59 AM) AoC Difficulty Adjustment: Jeremy Howard notes that AoC 2023 Day 1 Part 2 is significantly harder than normal; students are encouraged to skip it if finding it tough, focusing instead on practicing the course process.
12/5/24 (9:17 PM) New Tool Release (ShellSage): Introduction of "ShellSage," an LLM that lives in the terminal, capable of seeing directory context and command history.
1/31/25 (4:09 AM) Lesson Content Summary: A detailed index covering Lessons 1 through 13 is shared, highlighting key topics such as list comprehensions, TDD, LLM evaluations, ShellSage, recursion, web scraping (BeautifulSoup), and Lean Startup principles (featuring guest Eric Ries).
8/16/25 (2:36 AM) Confidentiality Lifted: Solveit receives its first public showing, and members are informed they are now free to share blog posts and information about the platform.
10/2/25 (6:10 PM) Major Relaunch Announcement: The second cohort of SIWC, "fully open to all," is announced to start on November 3rd, 2025, running on a new scalable infrastructure (solve.it.com).
Takeaway: First cohort members receive a 50% discount ($200 vs $400) and free access to the new platform until at least December 10th (later extended to the end of 2025).
Takeaway: The new platform is highly capable, used for sysadmin, hosting production apps, and legal work.
10/13/25 (4:41 AM) Platform Feature Expansion: The second cohort start date is officially Nov 3rd. An overview of the "huge improvements" to Solveit is provided, including collaborative editing, multiple instances, AI search capability, and "full dialog metaprogramming."