AI Coding Community Resources: from Free Tools to Pro Tips

Earlier today there was a post asking if AI was useful at coding in real tech companies, and everyone who answered "I am in tech and yes it's used now" was massively downvoted.

I want to say this up front: I do not believe AI is good for society. It's funded by the ruling class in order to liquidate labor and it's not environmentally sustainable. It might not be economically sustainable either, which is dangerous because the entire economy is being gambled on it making money, which it is not.

Anyway here's my lived experience. I am a principal level ML engineer at a fortune 50 company. I was hand coding neural networks for natural language a decade ago. I got it into deep learning because I thought it was fascinating that machines could learn complex patterns from data. I've followed what is now called AI and experimented with it since its infancy, took Stanford classes on the math of transformer networks, etc. This was well before there was a hint it would morph into the monstrosity of capital that it has become.

In 2025 I was a vocal critic of the AI-assisted coding to the point where I pissed off senior execs by voicing my opinion in meetings.

Back then the people hyping AI were either attempting to sell it or they were novice/non-programmers who were blown away that they could get a simulacrum of a web app (riddled with bugs and security issues) without any domain knowledge. I thought it was hilarious, and pathetic.

Through a combination of masochism and curiosity I've exclusively used AI to write all code since November 2025. Which is why I knew that for real project work, AI would run roughshod on your entire codebase, mass producing a Winchester mansion of slop even when given simple tasks. It would take your thoughtful, hard-won abstractions and make 5 competing abstractions rather than leveraging what was there. It'd ignore instructions, break or even delete break core functionality to solve the "bugs" that it created (scare quotes because they weren't even bugs half the time, just incomplete understanding). It would write 1000 lines of slop to fix a problem that a one line change could fix.

It was a huge waste of time and money. I communicated this to management to their chagrin when they looked to me for advice.

In early 2026 improved models came out and the value proposition began to shift towards something somewhat usable. By spring, Claude Opus 4.6 was capable of writing real code, yet it took about as much effort as coding it hand for subpar results. It needed constant handholding and reminders, made a lot of mistakes, and would get looney tunes stupid at the end of a long session and start vandalizing its own progress. I used it as a novelty, but it was really frustrating.

By summer 2026 with the release of Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol, it is actually more than useful, it's good. No, really. It became less like an overzealous and intoxicated intern and more like a practical minded senior engineer. It follows directions, it reads your documentation, it can take notes and reference older notes, and given with connectors to git and internal wikis it can find the answers needed to integrate complicated systems, come up with a plan, independently implement it, write a suite of tests, run review agents, and take in their feedback all in one turn. It takes skill to be able to manage it, and more importantly domain knowledge to ask it for what is needed by stakeholders, but at this point it is much faster than I am. I run 5 sessions at once in different projects and it's probably 5x faster at getting production code than a human in each session.

Anyway, pretty much every engineer I know is using AI now because it works, even old timers who were very much opposed to it. Vibe coding has become the standard, now it's just called coding. Everyone is scrambling to stay relevant, and teams are changing their whole stack around AI agents - implementing code review agents, vibe coding tooling around AI agents, creating connectors and skills for every data resource possible: confluence, jira, outlook, GitHub, databases, etc. Teams are solving months of technical debt in a week, creating boilerplate code 10x faster, etc. Everyone is a bit nervous.

I don't say this because I want you to think AI is good for the world. It's not. The reason I'm writing this is to communicate that the tech has progressed. Even Linus Torvalds, the guy who made git and Linux uses it and accepts AI contributions to the Linux kernel.

There are many good reasons to hate AI and I think they converge in one place: elites are enticed by the prospect that it can obsolete the working class.

Personally, I don't want AI to be good. I don't even want it to exist. I hate that my job is babysitting bots. I miss the creativity of writing code. I don't want to lose my job in a few years when the AI systems we're frantically building are in place and management decides humans are too expensive.

The loom displaced workers and rightly caused a backlash among displaced workers, but it did so while producing cloth. Put your anger in the right place - the power hungry demons who want workers to be obsolete, not the workers who are forced to use it to be competitive in the job market.

It's tempting to think AI for coding is all bullshit and slop as it was until recently used to be; because AI is a net negative for humanity and the planet; because the value prop was non-existent and inflated by hype. However those don't mean that the tech itself is not improving. The Butlerian jihad can't come soon enough.

edit:

thanks to the wisdom of this community it has come to my attention that I am a disingenuous slop peddling brain rotted zombie that has no clue what I'm doing and pushes absolute bug riddled garbage to production and I'm too cowardly to post the code that is owned by my employer. thanks for the epiphany.

maybe it wasn't clear that using this tech effectively isn't easy and it takes a lot of tooling to work around common issues because out of the box it's not reliable enough. it's not worth much without domain experience and putting in the effort and time to figure out how to use it effectively. this isn't a place for sharing software engineering techniques, so I focused on the outcomes which may have oversimplified the technical part.

to the haters, I hope you take some time today to do something you enjoy instead of being miserable to others on the internet.

AI Engineer Roadmap with free resources -

Programming & Fundamentals

1- – Curated list of project-based tutorials (includes Python basics + hands-on programming projects)

2- – Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow (code from the bestselling book, free notebooks)

Machine Learning & Deep Learning

3- – Curated list of awesome Machine Learning frameworks, libraries, and resources (by language)

4- – Curated list of awesome Deep Learning tutorials, projects, books, and communities

5- – Microsoft's free 12-week ML curriculum with lessons and quizzes

Generative AI & LLMs

6- – Comprehensive roadmap for Generative AI with free resources and projects

7- – State-of-the-art library for NLP, LLMs, and transformers (examples, models, and tutorials)

Hands-on Projects & Labs

8- – 500+ AI/ML/DL/CV/NLP projects with free code

9- – Free ML engineering bootcamp with practical projects and deployment

MLOps & Production

10- – Free MLOps course covering experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD

11- – Curated list of awesome MLOps tools, platforms, and references

Roadmaps & Interviews

12- – AI Engineer Roadmap 2025 – Learn AI, ML, Deep Learning, MLOps, and Big Data with projects & resources

13- – Comprehensive AI roadmap (Data Science, Generative AI, Agentic AI) with week-by-week plans and projects

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Right here? This subreddit has a strict NO AI policy (see Rule #13)

Hello. A month ago, I made a website listing all of the coding plans I could find at because so many of the alternative resources were of such poor quality. The maintenance has been somewhat annoying with all of the changes to various plans recently, but now I'm trying to expand the list. I currently have 73 plan providers listed, and I'm looking for more. If there are any plans that you're aware of not listed here, please send them.

I spent the last week cataloging every vibe coding tool in existence into one organized awesome list.

501 resources across 35+ categories:

* AI Coding Agents - Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf, Aider, Cline, Devin, and 25+ more

* No-Code App Builders - Lovable, bolt.new, v0, Replit Agent, and 15+ more

* Prompt Engineering - Guides, templates, rules files for .cursorrules and CLAUDE.md

* MCP Servers - 35+ servers for GitHub, databases, Slack, Figma, and more

* Local AI - Ollama, LM Studio, DeepSeek Coder, StarCoder 2, and more

* AI Image/Video/Audio - Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway, ElevenLabs

* Data Science, Backend APIs, Git tools, Browser Extensions

* 50+ learning resources, communities, podcasts, newsletters

Open source, actively maintained, and accepting PRs. If I'm missing something, let me know!

Can anyone recommend some no ai communities? I've been employed for about 2 months now, my first job, and i realize im getting dumber because i basically have to use ai because of tight deadlines. Im thinking of dedicating some learning time for coding outside of work

With the rise of agentic AI coding has changed drastically. Let's say you use Claude code or cursor at your job and most of the times it spits out normal code, maybe not fully optimized but that's not even the practices they follow in services based work. If the agent changes 10-15 files in one go we as humans with limited cognitive capacity don't even want to read it. I know many of you will say, try to limit it or break down a task but still when it spits out working code a few times your brain just automatically wants to trust it and you have a hard time reviewing it. How do you guys keep up with that?

Hello, I'm a professional mid-level dev looking for the best resources/courses to upskill how I use AI for coding. I've spent a couple months using claude code and am somewhat happy with opus plan mode but find that I need to revise the plan 1-3 times for passable results and need to remind it on some basic principles. I've tried using subagents but have had trouble getting CC to invoke them at the right time. Also getting it to understand test-driven development correctly has had limited results.

I'm looking for resources/communities catering to pro devs (taught by pro devs) on how to best utilize AI. I'm willing to dedicate a significant amount of time/money for training. Ideally, it's in the form of a continuously updated structured program. Any recommendations from my fellow pro devs out there?

EDIT: I mostly do freelance fullstack web dev in case that matters. My main language is typescript.

I’ll go first.

My go-to setup right now is the Google AI subscription trial that gives access to Gemini + some claude credits for free, which is honestly solid for most coding tasks.

I’m also grandfathered into the GLM $6/month plan. It’s hit or miss depending on what you’re doing, but overall it gets the job done.

Curious what others are using lol. Looking for legit methods trials, student perks, loopholes, etc....what actually works for you ?

You are on the best one already, in my honest opinion.

Here it’s all about the old method of learning, and that’s all.

Good day.

I'd argue that basically every single subreddit that is programming related is pretty anti-AI (possibly even to a fault) and if you actually want AI discussion, that you need to go finding AI-coding-specific subs. You should be fine here, , etc. whatever other subs you can think of.

I do think this sub, specifically being "learn" programming, tends to be more clear in the idea of whether or not you're even anti or pro-AI, that this sub is dedicated to you learning programming itself. So the literal topic of the sub is inherently against AI due to obvious reasons.

I want to start in AI coding as Iam watching videos I start hearing some strange words Tokens and ect is there any video that introduce you to that stuff?

Woah…. This looks like a 4 yr training program bro

i'm the guy building slicer.dev - would love to be on that list! it captures interactive ui (animations, hover states, etc) from live sites as ai-ready prompts. you pull components onto a canvas, restyle them component-by-component, and then export to lovavle, cc or cursor. way more precise than describing things from a screenshot

Do I need to cover all these in order?if not suggest any good one which explains concepts first and then implies it practical way

how did you find all these tools?

I would suggest just using AI to learn about AI.

ai will answer your ai qyery

Set a clear expectation of what you want to accomplish?

I am a university student i need ai to help me with my work and to learn from that ai i ussually use java and c# mainly java can u guys recomend a ai tool for make coding easier for me

Hi everyone,

I’m a student and I want to learn coding from absolute beginner level to advanced, mainly because I want to build things related to AI in the future.

The problem is that the internet is full of different advice. Some people say start with Python, some say learn web development first, and some say focus on math and algorithms.

So I’m a bit confused about the best roadmap.

My goal is: • Start from zero (I don’t know coding yet) • Eventually build AI tools or apps • Learn the most useful skills step-by-step

My questions are:

1. What programming language should I start with for AI?
2. What skills should I learn first before moving to AI?
3. Are there any good free resources or courses for beginners?

I’d really appreciate any guidance from people who have already gone through this journey.

Thanks!