Exercism
Free programming practice across many languages with volunteer human mentorship.
why this verdict
Keep it — Anthropic has not replaced it
Anthropic's version overlaps, but does not finish the education job, so this one is still worth keeping open.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Coding agents solving practice exercises instantly, making deliberate practice easy to skip. Anthropic, May 20, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 2 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: LeetCode and Codewars.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
- Threatened by
- Anthropic
- Since
- May 20, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
Exercism offers thousands of exercises in dozens of languages, entirely free, with volunteer mentors who review submitted solutions and discuss trade-offs. AI can solve every exercise instantly, which makes cheating trivial and also makes the mentorship the point: a model will tell you your solution works, and a human will tell you why an experienced engineer would have written it differently. Being free and non-commercial insulates it from the market pressure crushing paid course platforms.
Escape hatches
Interview-focused problems with contests
leetcode.com open_in_newCommunity-created challenges and rankings
codewars.com open_in_newStructured backend curriculum rather than exercises
boot.dev open_in_new2 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.