RareCode.ai

Wrote a CLI in TypeScript (a language I know well) and then had Claude one-shot it to Rust (a language I barely know). Props to @RareCodeAI and their Rust class. There's no way I could have written this myself, but Rare Code gave me the skills to understand the code.

As I close in on 1,000 days of Duolingo, and as I keep making progress on the @RareCodeAI Rust course, I’ve been thinking a lot about educational tourism vs real online education. Duolingo is optimized for fun, not learning.. and I don't mean that as an insult... it’s a design choice. In optimizing for fun, it creates a vanity metric: streaks. Streaks make users feel like they’re learning. They make investors feel like users are learning. But most people are just playing a game. That doesn’t make Duolingo useless. A memory game can be enjoyable. I play NYT Connections too, I just don’t confuse it with education. Used alone, Duolingo will not teach you a language. I spent two years living in Spanish-speaking countries. I did 30–45 min of Duolingo each morning for vocab plus three one-hour private lessons per week, and I made real progress. Duolingo helped... but only as a small piece of a serious plan. That’s how people end up abroad, streak intact, unable to order coffee. Compare that to Rare Code. Each problem has an AI tutor, but it refuses to give answers. It asks questions. It forces you to think. When I've asked it "I'm lost, what's the answer", the AI refuses to answer, it says things like "look at line 5 and compare that to what you did in the previous problem". Every ~20 lessons, it drops you into a blank box and says: “Tell me what you’ve learned.” No prompts. No hints. You're forced to recall. That’s challenging, and if it was DuoLingo, it would stop being fun and people would drop off. But, it's also why it works. Real education is challenging. It requires effort ... but most people like the "idea of learning" more than they like putting in the work. Duolingo isn’t bad. But educational tourists shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking one lesson a day equals progress. If you actually want to learn something, choose platforms that make learning harder (not more fun), and be honest about the time it takes. Rough rule of thumb to get good (not great): • Natural Languages: ~45 min/day for ~3 months • Programming Languages: 2–3 hrs/day for ~3 months There are shortcuts.