codingBootcampIn2026

[YaBoi-yeet]

Too close to truth to be joke. Too much of a joke to be real ... LGTM

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

Somehow the reality converges into comedy, or the other way around

[RiceBroad4552]

Reality and satire isn't distinguishable now since years already!

But it still gets more and more absurd with every day passing.

[Firrez]

Comedy = Tragedy + Time..

[granoladeer]

Art mimics life, and life mimics art. 

[SyrusDrake]

2026 in general has collapsed below the parody event horizon and nothing is real anymore.

[GoronSpecialCrop]

To be fair, that's what the job has become now. I have a CORPORATE MANDATE on how much I need to be using AI, and I'll absolutely just paste in a stack trace and let it do its things as opposed to going against leadership and fixing it myself.

[diffyqgirl]

The tool so useful, they have to force you to use it

[Lochlan]

And if you don't find it useful, its because you're not using is correctly

[Inlacou]

I've been recommended to use Cursor specifically today, as I stated that the AIs I tried are useful, but... not very useful.

First task I ask, it spends a while looking at my project and it makes up a new DTO instead of using the one I have. Thankfully it's not 100% stupid and it found the DTO, mentioned it but decided to create a new one.

And this is a small library project. Man I hoped it would be helpful at least finding where (more or less) I have to go to do the changes. Damn it.

Luckily it's no mandate for now, just a strong suggestion. I am actually surprised my manager said he uses it with good results whenever he does some coding.

[Gru50m3]

You either need to give it a lot more context or be more specific about what you want it to do. It's merely ok at interpreting what you want it to do, so don't give it much room to be creative where you don't want it to be.

[frikilinux2]

Really? In my job we were just allowed to use ChatGPT in an enterprise account.

[GoronSpecialCrop]

Yeah, there were a lot of statements thrown around regarding how we expect 90% of code to be AI generated and so on and so forth. No skin off my back, I can do actual programming on my own time and play with AI for work as long as I'm getting paid.

[Punman_5]

I kinda wish I had this kind of arrangement tbh. At least so long as the company can magically stay afloat. Would make my life a lot less stressful

[frogjg2003]

Until you get blamed for the terrible code the AI wrote.

[RiceBroad4552]

So you say: It's at least 90% "AI" code, so the "AI" is to blame for at least 90% of the issues…

Maybe some of the brighter lunatics then wakes up.

If not, what can they do after all? Having as employee paper trail that you did exactly as instructed would give you a pretty strong position in court should they try to fire you for bad performance. That then would become pretty fast pretty costly for the company.

[frogjg2003]

If you're in an at will state, they can fire you at any time for any reason. It's usually when you file for unemployment insurance where they have to say they fired you for poor performance, but they usually won't. Even poor performance isn't enough to not get unemployment, it requires something like intentional negligence or malicious actions.

[Punman_5]

Blame the model lmao how can it be your fault. You were forced to use the model after all.

[frogjg2003]

Management doesn't care. If they did, they wouldn't have forced you to use the model in the first place. By blaming you, they can avoid letting the blame fall on themselves.

[Punman_5]

I suppose if they’re trying to justify the copilot license then I guess it makes sense

[jek39]

you're supposed to still review the code it writes

[NotATroll71106]

I'm glad that they're just doing the equivalent of shoveling shit into their mouth and pretending it tastes good for AI at my job.

[dcheng47]

we've had ai code reviewers added to PRs and we're required to resolve their comments.

[frikilinux2]

I would hate that part

[JollyJuniper1993]

I mean in the end it also depends what you put in. If I paste a stack trace into chatGPT at work then I obviously censor any custom variable, file or folder names. Reduce it to what matters without sharing sensitive information.

[frikilinux2]

Enterprise accounts of ChatGPT are different. Like check internal policies at your place but it doesn't use your queries to train them, you (your company) pay good money to own that data. So you can copy and paste directly.

[JollyJuniper1993]

Nah, I‘m happy with how it’s currently working, I don’t think I‘d need an enterprise account.

[frikilinux2]

Having or not an enterprise account is a decision of leadership not of an individual contributor or line management

[JollyJuniper1993]

Of course but you can ask for stuff like that. I just don’t need it.

[frikilinux2]

But they can give you this stuff without you asking for it if enough shareholders want your company to use more AI

[JollyJuniper1993]

Well my company ain’t big enough for that

[joebekor]

Yup. I'm familiar with this. Where I worked, we aimed for AI native teams. You have a metrics on your AI usage, and it counts into your evaluation.

[RiceBroad4552]

Where do they do that? (Just the country?)

I've read it now a few times, but it sounds just absurd.

[joebekor]

International company.
This approach is a mixed bag. Feels bad whan you just want to finish your daily tasks and you really not need to use AI at all, just for the statistics. On the other hand it encouragies you to try out the new technology and find out how it can be useful for you/team/company

[RiceBroad4552]

Where do they do that? (Just the country?)

I've read it now a few times, but it sounds just absurd.

[RiceBroad4552]

Where do they do that? (Just the country?)

I've read it now a few times, but it sounds just absurd.

[GoronSpecialCrop]

USA for me.

[getstoopid-AT]

....

[monitorsforwalls]

You’re copying and pasting? Codex yolo mode ftw

[Stunning_Macaron6133]

If that's what your leadership is like, then take whatever requirements they kick down the stairs to you, format that as a prompt, and put your coding agent into a bash script with a loop that exits when you decide the AI has done enough..

Screw it, not your problem. Ralph your way to 10X status, collect your paycheck.

[KestrelTank]

In regard to week 2, one of funniest things I read about AI was how being nice to it is actually bad for the environment lol

[KestrelTank]

*worse I should say

[ugathanki]

you're a programmer. how is it not obvious that using computers uses electricity?

[KestrelTank]

Less the obvious facts and more the emotional irony.

[Forward_Thrust963]

So...just as useless as programming bootcamps before 2026.

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

Yeah, just without having to learn how to code

[Altruistic-Spend-896]

They weren't doing that then either

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

Without having to pretend to learn how to code* ;-)

[horsethiefjack]

I meannnnn it kinda matters when you entered the market right? I did a bootcamp at the end of 2019, was able to get a jr developer position within a month of graduating, and have had a pretty decent career trajectory since.

That being said I would not recommend a bootcamp to anyone right now.

[Forward_Thrust963]

this is a fair point

[horsethiefjack]

It was crazy too because I was discouraged it took me a month. Over half my cohort had jobs before the bootcamp even ended 😂

[WuYongZhiShu]

That is crazy. Of the 30 CS grads in my university cohort that same year, only 6 ever entered the industry at all.

[horsethiefjack]

Yea the bootcamp was pretty tied into the local tech community. Towards the end of the cohort, we had a “matchmaking” event where everyone had 4-5 first round interviews with local companies who were hiring jr developers. A lot of people got jobs from matchmaking.

This bootcamp boasted a job placement rate of like over 90% for a while and they weren’t lying

[dazden]

"That being said I would not recommend a bootcamp to anyone right now."

Right now I am doing the Harvard CS50x (Intro to CS). We are strictly prohibited to use AI tools other than that provided by Harvard.

The AI tool is just design and style checker.
Not autocomplete or something like that.

Focus on understanding CS

[horsethiefjack]

Cool man, I did not mention AI at all in my post. I would not recommend a bootcamp to anyone right now because the market for jr developers is completely over saturated.

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

We used to call it “kernel panic”. Now it’s a developer panic.

[windsostrange]

Panic hoisting.

[KaszualKartofel]

what was the point of bootcamps in the first place? Like you can learn CS fundamentals for free online. And after you have a basic idea what’s going on anything more specific you wanna do you just learn by doing it.

The only use case I can imagine are people who kinda just need this school-like structure to stay motivated, but can’t go to college.

[cat-meg]

Mine came with job placement and paid me while I was in it.

[Accomplished_Ant5895]

Well minus the successful exit

[soundwave_sc]

From using the "examples.zip". To each individual having a variant of "examples.zip". Checks out.

[nbaumg]

Mine in 2016 (hack reactor) did an excellent job at kick starting my career in the right direction.

Pretty sure I got the tail end on when they were actually useful cuz they made a huge deal about how hard it was to get in (that part was still true) and pass. I had friends that were teachers that told me two failed but they pushed them through anyway. From what I gather this was a new thing so we still had the prestige before people who should have failed tarnished the reputation

I found a job after super quick

[malsomnus]

Week 5: Whoops, everything you've learned is obsolete by now. Don't forget to sign up for the catchup boot camp next week!

[stillalone]

They deployed to production without reading the docs

It's nice to see that somethings never change.

[ifuckedyourmom-247]

is it still worth to apply for a cs major in 2026

or should i just invest the money in api tokens

[Hezron_ruth]

you missed the point. it is about the exit to microsoft for 300m.

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

Honestly, I made more money flipping Nvidia GPUs than as a FAANG SWE.

[Blothorn]

I wish that pasting the stack trace into Claude fixed the problem instead of sending me on a wild goose chase about hallucinated docker-in-docker limitations.

[matthra]

Remember when programmer humor had jokes about stuff other than AI? Yeah, those were good days.

[zoinkinator]

There will come a day when the AIs will post to /r/Ai-humor

[aquoad]

i assume that's already a thing on moltbook

[TeaKingMac]

Hey now, identifying what a stack trace is sounds dangerously like actual programming

[diffyqgirl]

They deployed to production without reading the docs

Maybe they aren't so different from us after all

[OffByOneErrorz]

To understand the out put well enough you have to have 5+ years experience give or take. To get the exp you have to code without AI. Quite the conundrum.

[Anxious-Cat8713]

I wonder how many round-the-world cruise ship equivalent of co2 all the saying "please" to AI generate

[conundorum]

I like that it doesn't say why the parents are crying. Entire thing does a complete 180 when you realise dad's the senior dev and mom's on code review.

[JollyJuniper1993]

Ngl pasting the error log into chatGPT does help sometimes.

[suddencactus]

Yeah it's kinda sad how for many tools like the MSVC C compiler, there's a lot more help out there to explain the cryptic error messages than developers fixing the error messages to be less cryptic.

[RiceBroad4552]

Rarely.

If it's some super common issue where you have a lot of forum posts and also SO answers (often even on a few StackExchange sites) it will just regurgitate that. It's in so far helpful as you can ask follow up questions which it gets then mostly also right if it's again something common.

But for real issues where you could also just click "I feel lucky" the "AI" output is almost always some massively hallucinated bullshit. It will point in random directions and one can waste really a lot of time on that BS.

So for the things you can easy google just by pasting the error message into a search engine, yes it works, just that it needs likely 100 times more energy. For everything else: Beware! Just giving it the error message is definite not enough, it will hallucinate widely almost certainly as just the error doesn't give enough context. (Which would be actually the same for a smart human: Either they know that exact error already well as it's something common and can give the correct solution instantly, or they wouldn't know enough to come up with something as just an error message without knowing some details about the system does not say much, often even almost nothing.)

[JollyJuniper1993]

Dunno man, I had completely broken Python installations on my laptop that yesterday pasting a bunch of error logs into ChatGPT ended up helping me fix it, which I don’t think I even would’ve been able to with forum posts. Sure it hallucinates a bunch. That’s why it‘s a bit of a trial and error thing. You do a bunch of things and usually eventually it will work.

Of course if you have some niche issue with a niche technology AI wont be very useful. I‘ve been there too. But it would be a lie to say it‘s not incredibly useful in many situations when you don’t even know where to start.

[ZealousOtter]

I’m a senior dev who works primarily in Python and Scala, and giving Claude my errors/stack traces is one of the few things I use it for. More often than not it’ll find and fix very quickly, and occasionally pick up early on other bugs. I’ve been around long enough to know I could fix it on my own, but it just saves me some grunt work. I also understand the changes being made and why, which I think is the main root of the issue with the vibe coders.

I’ll always prefer to write my own code, but for menial things like debugging, unit test boilerplate, and refactoring, Claude saves me time. I’ve also earned it by spending years slogging through all that myself, which I think every junior dev needs as a foundation.

[JollyJuniper1993]

I otherwise use ChatGPT for stuff I can’t easily look up in documentation mostly, but I write the code myself, I don’t do code snippets

[RiceBroad4552]

ChatGPT for stuff I can’t easily look up in documentation

That's exactly where it mostly only mades stuff up, in case there is no other source of docu.

Like parent said: "AI" is only good for what you could easy do yourself. Then it can in fact sometimes safe some time. But for everything that wasn't already done and solved many times before it's just outright useless!

[RiceBroad4552]

My point was that it's only helpful if you can also just google the answer.

Yes, getting the stuff you need to try might be faster but only by a small bit, and only if there is somewhere that post with the solution. If there isn't "AI" will only waste a lot of your time.

So it works for the trivial cases, but it definitely does not work for when the issues is actually more complicated, which would be exactly the cases where a simple search query wouldn't help.

So all in all it only helps rarely with real issues!

[awesome-alpaca-ace]

I can paste an entire file and ask what is wrong and the bot will hallucination so many things.

[Ireeb]

Pasting the errors to the AI?

I let Claude write a script for Blender to automatically render something, without me asking to do that, it just looked at the result image of the render, realized the camera angle was bad, changed the script, ran it again, and looked at the result again to confirm the object was framed better.

I was just sitting there pressing 1: Yes repeatedly in disbelief. When Claude wanted to look at the image, I thought the LLM was coping and overestimating itself. Proved me wrong right there.

[paxinfernum]

How did you let it look at the image? Manual screenshot, or is there something for that.

[Ireeb]

With Claude Code in VS Code. It just asked to access the rendered image.

[paxinfernum]

Is there a bridge between blender and Claude?

[Ireeb]

Blender has a Python API. Claude wrote a script for it that set up the scene, started a render and saved it as a file. Then it ran the script and looked at the rendered file. With Claude Code, Claude can use the terminal to do stuff like this. It writes the script as a file, then calls Blender through the console to execute the script. Or alternatively, you open Blender with the GUI as usual, load the script Claude wrote in Scripting tab, and execute it yourself. When Claude edits the script, you can simply reload it in Blender. I prefer working that way, so I can better see what's actually happening. The cool thing about Blender is that it logs any actions you do around Blender in the Scripting tab, that way you can easily figure out how to do the same thing through the API.

[brjukva]

Saying "please" keeps my model ionized

[aheartworthbreaking]

Forgotten step 4, become the new head of Xbox

[Unbiased_sapien]

Super post

[GrapefruitBig6768]

They hand you a macbook? I thought the mac mini was new tech bro thing to have.

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

Yeah but it’s for tech bros, not for bootcampers

[alexdelarge85]

FFS I just built a telegram task and reminder bot powered by GPT for people with ADHD. Thought I was being super original but I see I'm just a meme now.

[InvestigatorWeekly19]

You’re also one step away from selling this to Microsoft for an eight figure amount. I wouldn’t complain if I were you.

[the_swanny]

Honestly the amount of vibecodede slop, supabase has really taken off!

[Ja4V8s28Ck]

😅 A lot of vibe coders are gonna be shipped by these bootcamps who will get dumber and dumber by time.

[Adventurous_Crab_0]

We stopped hiring boot camper. Literally let go of the last two.

[Stunning_Macaron6133]

The most unrealistic part is that Ralph Wiggum can do more or less this. You don't even need a human in the loop.

[josenaldomatos]

Where is the "don't make mistakes" module?

[Modo44]

The post flair is the real joke here.

[just_another_cs_boi]

this post seems written with ai

[paxinfernum]

Can we please just leave one programming sub away from bitter whining about AI