#175 From electrical engineering student to CTO with Hitesh Choudhary
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2025
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews former CTO and prolific programming teacher Hitesh Choudhary.
We talk about:
- The limits of AI in building a robust codebase
- Time management
- Higher Education in India
- Lessons from training developers
- Lessons you've learned from your travel
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Support also comes from the 11,384 kind folks who support freeCodeCamp through a monthly donation. You can join these chill human beings and help our charity's mission by going to https://donate.freecodecamp.org
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Hitesh's TypeScript course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/programming-in-typescript/
- Hitesh's project-oriented Appwrite course on freeCodeCamp https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/comprehensive-full-stack-react-with-appwrite-tutorial/
- Hitesh's Git course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-git-in-detail-to-manage-your-code/
- Hitesh's TED talk on time management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1KrFy_3LYQ
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Tase Chaldry, welcome to the Free Coat Camp podcast. Thank you so much, Quincy. Super excited to be here. Yeah, we're excited to have you here too, man. Like you have created so many awesome courses for the community over the years, both on your own channel, which has grown. It's like nearly a million folks tuning into that and then on the Free Coat Camp channel. So thank you. It's a, it's been a long time coming having |
| 0:21.6 | you on the podcast. Thank you so much. I was super excited for the whole day that, yeah, finally, |
| 0:26.0 | today we are meeting up. Yeah. Yeah. And you're over in Jaipur. It's pretty late there. Thank you for |
| 0:32.5 | your flexibility in meeting with me. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So I wanted to go ahead and start off by talking about |
| 0:39.3 | AI. You've been doing a lot of courses on leveraging AI and you have a pretty good grasp on the |
| 0:46.7 | practical limits of using AI as far as building and maintaining a code base. What are your thoughts |
| 0:52.2 | on the current state of AI coding tools? |
| 0:56.3 | AI coding tools, I would be, I'll be honest here, they are pretty awesome. But they do certainly |
| 1:01.6 | have a limit. So the most people and especially students, when they get an introduction to the AI, |
| 1:06.4 | that I want to leverage it, I want to use it, they see like, hey, build me a to-do app or build me |
| 1:10.6 | this XYZ. And AI does all the job. And this is use it. They see like, hey, build me a to-do app or build me this XYZ. |
| 1:11.6 | And AI does all the job. And this is very scary for the students that, oh, now AI can do all the job. But the reality is different when you move into a different code base. So we do have another company, one of the LMS, one of the pretty big one. We serve around 22 million users there. and the code base is pretty |
| 1:27.9 | insanely huge, especially on Ruby on Rails. |
| 1:30.9 | And there we we serve around 22 million users there. And the code base is pretty insanely huge, especially on Ruby on Rails. |
| 1:30.9 | And there we realize, whenever engineers use all of the AI, it has its limitation. |
| 1:36.0 | The context is not properly served. |
| 1:38.0 | The code that comes out is not that much of a great quality. |
| 1:41.5 | But I would not shy away to say that it has increased our |
| 1:45.0 | productivity in delivering the features as well. So by knowing the AI, surely you can become |
| 1:50.3 | at least 1.5 or 2x of what you have been writing the code, but it can't do all of the job. |
| 1:56.6 | AI is currently on a position where it's marketed heavily that it will solve X, Y, Z, every |
| 2:01.5 | problem on the planet. But we all know it's not going to do that. It has its limitation, |
... |
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