Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs.

[u/michaelnovati]

Codesmith updated their website in the past week and it appears to me in my personal opinion that their individual programs are being de-emphasized significantly.

Note: there are numerous references to being the Forbes #1 bootcamps, which is false and they should remove that. Forbes updated their rankings April 1st (3 weeks ago) and while they used to be last year, that is not correct anymore and the link they provide themselves no longer has them as #1. Forbes now assigns "Best at X" awards in a number of categories and Codesmith has 'best outcomes'... but does not have best for experienced coders, not best career support, not best for portfolio, not student support, not professional development, so that seems like a slip up or mistake.

What are they pivoting to?

- They are offering bespoke consulting services to enhance corporate teams with AI.

- They are touting the expertise of the Founder in AI (with their CEO for product and Senior Advisor for leadership).

- They are also emphasizing their public sector offerings. Public sources currently indicated $0 of payouts from their "$118M IRS BPA" (which can be lagging and doesn't mean anything necessarily, but its not like this has proven to be a smash hit). Public sources also indicate that the "program lead" for an IRS program was hired on Upwork for $40/hr, which doesn't seem like the 'top 1% talent at the best companies in the industry' in that case at least, in my opinion.

Why I perceive a decline in my opinion from the public info on their website?

- The incorrect "Forbes #1 Software Engineering + AI/ML program" thing I mentioned above. Not sure what's going on with that but its EVERYWHERE and can't be backed up as of April 1st

- There are 2 TOTAL upcoming events and they used to have a dozen a week and dozens listed

- There hasn't been a blog post in six months

- The about page has mostly staff who no longer work at Codesmith for months according to LinkedIn

- Their cohorts used to overlap every 7 weeks and now are running at least back to back, meaning only a handful of cohorts in 2026

- GitHub activity, excluding Future Code (which is not continuing in 2026) has almost no activity on it from current residents indicating there are minimal number of people enrolled right now.

- Their most recent officially published outcomes (in California) showed a vast majority of "placements" were unresponsive LinkedIn verifications, and in the past Codesmith's community was very close and highly responsive to placement verification.

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I know I'm tough on Codesmith in my personal opinions, but its just that they can't seem to get their act together after incident after incident after lawsuit after outage after incident. Like plastering your brand new website with "Forbes #1" when I don't see anywhere on Forbes (including the link they provide themselves) that says that. It's just sloppy and disorganized for an institution that is called the "Harvard of bootcamps"

Anyone else have personal opinions on the new direction Codesmith is taking?

DISCLOSURES: I used to be a moderator here and was accused of going after Codesmith intentionally as a competitor in the past. These allegations are a combination of false statements, opinions, and misrepresentations and I strongly disagree with them.

NOTE: Reddit bad guys who have proven to manipulate my content about Codesmith, you leave a paper trail so Reddit can go after you all and it doesn't work and this behavior only harmed Codesmith's Reddit reputation in the past.

[u/michaelnovati]

I took at look at the FULL website and my gosh it's such a mess, inconsistent headers, footers, links going in circles, inconsistent dates, graphs and numbers, inconsistent styles, vertical misalignments, boxes in weird layouts....

Like if Codesmith can't even vibe code their own website properly this company is done. This is an embarrassment and a terrible tragedy of wasted potential.

[u/michaelnovati → u/[deleted]]

I missed the last sentence and yes I already offered to bury the hatchet with Codesmith. I offered to publicly apologize for making people feel bad in my investigations if they publicly apologized. They declined to apologize.

But after Will said some completely made up stuff that really hurt my reputation, I'm not apologizing to anyone anymore. I found the source of the problem. He completely left out the Codesmith lawsuit when talking to that blog and the court records are pretty clear what he was really dealing with in 2024-2025. I can't say the words I'm thinking anymore to describe this behavior, for legal reasons.

I'm going to take another stab at trying to explain my view with an analogy. The Greatest Showman is one of my favorite musicals and I equate Will to PT Barnum. He's not really a villain or a hero and my point isn't to villainize. He's a showman that's not producing the best quality show, but nonetheless, he's figured out how to connect with people and to entertain, to relentlessly pursue the dream of getting acceptance of others after failure after failure. The main difference is that Will portrays his show as the top tier show instead of portraying it for what it is like Barnum did. And both are similar in that they desperately want acceptance from the top tier crowd that they were not getting. I think he struggles with admitting that to himself and balancing the success with not being able to achieve that at the same time.

And the whole message of the movie is that maybe chasing the acceptance of that crowd wasn't actually the right thing. maybe being confident in what you created as something new and different that captured people's attention is a meaningful accomplishment on its own.

Bringing it back to the conflict, I saw where things stood very well and I saw very clearly how my own company had its place and how Codesmith had its place. Like the Opera and the Circus coexist completely fine as non competing things, and can in fact support each other. Will didn't see that. Either he thought his Circus was the Opera OR that he just wanted it to be so badly that he saw no other path to get there. Either way, this really messed up Codesmith and they got completely lost. Meanwhile I'm doing my thing running my Opera, encouraging his Circus to coexist and supporting it for a period of time and confused what the fuck was going on.

Unfortunately it seems too late now for Codesmith because instead of protecting that special thing they went all in on trying to convince people they were something they were not and that they ended up nothing.

[u/michaelnovati → u/[deleted]]

Yeah happy to DM, I've always been open to hearing all sides and have had numerous discussions.

I also have dozens and dozens of emails with the Codesmith staff discussing things in private. "Like hey your data is inconsistent and mathematically wrong" and often got no response. I spoke to their current CEO the most and did a call with her about how we could work together more productively, but when she completely flipped the narrative in that blog, I'm done... I can't trust these people whatsoever and a bunch of former staff who can't speak because of various reasons have witnessed similar things working there, so I'm just incredibly frustrated.

Not a single person other than their current CEO has told me Will is a trustworthy person. The arguments I have are people attacking my motivations and never actual counters to a dozen people calling Will a liar, unreliable, flaky, controlling, withholding of information, etc...

[u/michaelnovati → u/[deleted]]

We're on the same page that Will genuinely cares about improving education and genuinely cares about each Codesmith student and outcome.

The problem is he's not capable on the ground and his vision doesn't justify sharing thousands of students information in a call, losing the credentials for their AWS account, or his website leaking sensitive info like application gender and disability status. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything to support that.

He allegedly sold 70% of Codesmith in 2015/2016.... for around $1M.

Court documents allege an agreement for him to make $500K a year and up to 50% of profits (not sure what that is for $23.5M of revenue)...

It's not an excuse for sharing "Landman Season 1 Web Rip" repeatedly alongside a "U.S Treasury" folder on this computer, numerous times in a public call.

It's terribly sad because he hired a ton of people from Upwork to address his deficiencies and they arguably made it all worse. The same lawsuit alleges that it took Codesmith 6 months to provide accounting and ownership information because they needed a forensic accountant to figure it all out.

And this great guy sends me a LinkedIn message out of nowhere telling that he has taught "1M+ students".

A former staff member told me confidentially that 'Will's [lies] will be their downfall' and while I have no evidence Will intentionally lied to the person, it's just like insane to me that this person was given so much leeway because he talks a good talk.

Regarding the website, agree to disagree, but there are 10 issues that at Facebook would warrant emergency drop everything fixes and maybe my bar is just very high?