Hello everyone, Jono here. With the announcement of our new SolveIt course, people asking what is SolveIt the app, what is it all about, I thought I should show a few of the cases where I've used it outside of work recently, just to give you a feel for what SolveIt looks like, the kinds of things that it's ideally suited for, and what you can do.

So SolveIt is kind of like a dialogue between you, you can put notes to yourself, it's also a place to execute code, right? It's a Jupyter-style REPL environment, everything is live, so you can see if I've declared a variable that now exists, and I can modify that, right, and follow what's going on.

And it's also a dialogue between you and the computer, so for example, you can, any Python tool that you can use, you can give that to SolveIt as a tool, and it can interact with the code that you've written, variables that you've defined, and yeah, it's all interacting in that same environment.

So you can see here, it just added to that same variable, it's able to, you know, tell us how things work, explain things. So some of the use cases, you know, scraping data from a site, you can see here, like, I'm doing a lot of the work myself, exploring around, testing things out, but then I'm also able to just hand it like, "Hey, here's the contents of a page, could you help me pull out the pieces of information that I'm interested in?" Exploring models, so loading up little models to do bits of ML research on.

Again, really great to be able to just interact, explore, poke at things, and then also if you hit a roadblock, like at some point something's not working, or you're unsure what's going on, being able to ask the AI, like, "Hey, you know, how might I check that everything's on the right device?" Anytime you need that assistant.

Yeah, exploring, in this case, some recreational maths, you know, watching a YouTube video, and then again, like, doing a lot of this stuff myself, because it's just fun to have a computational playground, as it were, to test that ideas, but then also being able to ask it to, for example, use the search tool, tell me if I'm on the right track, it's able to give me, you know, fancy names to put to the concepts that's going on.

And also for things like, you know, in this case, yeah, exploring questions that I have, and writing things like the plotting code. I don't need to do the plotting myself, I'm more interested in the solving, but it's really cool to then have something that can say, "Oh, well, here you go, here's your fancy matplotlib output," right?

That's not the end goal for me, but it's nice to have this AI co-worker buddy. Yeah, so I use this for all sorts of things. I use it when I'm curious whether or not AI can do something, to pull together some data and send that as an eval. I use it for hopping out, like in this case, I've got a friend who's a civil engineer, analyzing some data, loading a file, poking at it, getting info from the AI, how might I pull out the relevant bits, you know, could it write the regular expression for me?

Thank you very much. And then importantly, being able to validate at every step. Okay, these are the lines I'm interested in. Can I do the convex hull? Yes, it can tell me how to do the convex hull. Great, I just want the bottom. Yes, it can tell me how to get that.

So it's very much a back and forth between you, between the computer that's executing the code, and between the AI. So yeah, those are just like some recent dialogues I had open. I hope that elucidates a little bit about how we use SolveIt as a tool and some of the things it can do.

It does feel like a different way of coding to anyone who's used to the offload everything to the AI. But it also feels like a very familiar and obvious way of coding if you're at all into the, you know, the way we used to teach in fast AI, right?

The sort of iterative exploratory programming with notebooks and mbdev. And for most people, it's like, why are you describing this as anything new? This is just how good code is code, is to do things in small incremental pieces that you understand. But yeah, it's exciting to build a tool that tries to focus on that in an age where a lot of tools are focused on human replacement.

So I hope you find that interesting. If you want to come check out a course where we'll be covering how to use this tool and this approach for all sorts of things, check out the new SolveIt course, how to solve it with code. But if you're just interested in the tool, once that course is complete, hopefully we'll be opening up just kind of pay-as-you-go subscriptions to access it, to use our instances in the cloud and our AI.

But yeah, otherwise you can take these ideas and you can apply them anywhere. So yeah, I just hope you get some encouragement from this to keep on playing playing with code and working at your craft.