✐ᝰ Thoughts On Coding Bootcamps in 2025

I’ve been mentoring at coding bootcamps and courses for around 10 years.

First, I’m talking about bootcamps: fast-paced, expensive (> 10,000 USD), and hyper-focused on a career overhaul.

My observation reveals an ugly truth: AI is better than most bootcamp grads, and it may take some years to catch up. Note that I’m using “is” and not “will be.” So why hire them?

Plus, with layoffs happening at a pace that people now consider it as “normal,” it’s hard to imagine a bootcamp grad competing with those senior engineers.

AI can code assignments perfectly

Around a year or two ago, I tried pretending to be a student and turned in a project that was 100% coded by AI. It took me less than five minutes to:

1. Ask AI: “Can you build a meme generator that fulfills the following criteria? (Pasted the assignment rubric)”
2. Copy the code to the files (with Cursor Composer nowadays this is only a click of a button)
3. Push the project to GitHub

And the project got a perfect score with positive comments.

Imagine being a frustrated student with a deadline towards the assignment of a pricey bootcamp. It’s super tempting to let AI help you through this hurdle. If this were to happen once, it’s bound to happen again.

Bootcamps won’t let you know that your background is too weak to succeed

Bootcamps are not doing well in 2025, a lot have closed, leading to them being even less picky with their students.

I remember a student asking: “I used VS Code to open the project files, but it isn’t the same as in the course video.” AI gave a somewhat generic response, which only confused the student even more:

Differences between your VS Code project view and a course video likely stem from:

- File/folder differences: Your project might have different files or folder structures due to updates, variations, or incomplete setup.
- VS Code extensions: The video might use extensions that alter the view, like project-specific extensions.
- VS Code settings: Different settings can affect how files and folders are displayed.
- Version differences: VS Code and project dependencies may have changed since the video was made.
- Hidden files: your view may be hiding hidden files.

The context here is the project files are zip files. It’s sort of “common sense” you gain along with using computers to know that it needs to be extracted.

This, unfortunately, is a true story and not a single case. Yes, you could argue that one would learn this over time, but again, in a bootcamp, time is scarce.

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This results in a negative spiral:

1. Student quality declines
2. More people trying to use AI to complete assignments
3. Leading to more incompetent bootcamp grads
4. Hurts the reputation of bootcamp grads
5. Even harder to find a job
6. Bootcamps have to market harder that this is for “everyone”

We’re not even factoring in through the process, mentors take pay cuts (for me, it has been more than 50%) and that also reduces mentor quality. There are still great mentors in bootcamps, but the trend overall is not great.

I may be killing my job, but as a mentor, I want more people to succeed. If you have absolutely 0 knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS, take the free courses online like freeCodeCamp. They have an active community where you can ask questions and learn at your pace.

But if you’re reading this, I assume you’re either on nekoweb, neocities, or have built your own site (a.k.a. the group of people with a background). You’re good to join coding bootcamps if the intensity will help drive you forward. Maybe I’ll get to be your mentor, who knows? And of course, I won’t be sharing where I mentor :)

What are the odds of you stumbling upon this article, as I don’t expect many people to be reading this.

#murmur