HN Explorer

Are AI courses mostly a waste of time?

3 points by lock-locku ↗ HN
Serious question: are most AI courses just a comfortable way to feel like you're learning? I spent months going through courses, videos, and tutorials… and still couldn’t build anything useful. Then I started building small, messy projects and learned more in weeks than in months. Recently I’ve been using nexskillai.com, and what stood out is how much it pushes you to actually apply things instead of just consuming content.

It made me question how effective most courses really are. Curious how others feel Did courses actually help you build real things, or just understand concepts? For context, I’m a mid-level AI specialist, and even then this shift surprised me.

3 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread
cebert
They’re a waste of time in my opinion with how rapidly this space is evolving. You’re better off spending your time building with these tools and learning with hands-on projects.
ThrowawayR2
Seems to be an ad; check the user's comment history with showdead enabled and observe that the same domain is casually inserted.
capydev42
This matches my experience.

I went through a lot of courses trying to find the “right” one, but didn’t end up building much.

What actually worked was learning the basics and then jumping into small, messy projects. That’s where things started to click.

I think courses are useful for building initial intuition, but they can create a false sense of progress. You feel like you're learning a lot, but you’re not forced to deal with real constraints or problems.

The biggest shift for me was going from “following along” to “figuring things out”.