What is Code Mentor?
TL;DR I created an AI agent to help me learn python and then decided to make it generally available. I put $60 in OpenAI API credit to be used in $10/month intervals. Make your account and start using Code Mentor for FREE today!
If you are breathing in oxygen and have an internet connection you have heard about AI agents. Agents have become a buzzword (see salesforce commercials), but they are also incredibly useful for doing a number of different tasks with AI models. The definition of AI agents I go with is the following; An AI model backed application that can autonomously complete a task using the given context without needing a human to make the decisions. What is Code Mentor and why is it an agent? I can hear you asking yourself. Code Mentor is a 3 node agent that is designed to help you learn to code through guided questioning that responds with helpful guidance to encourage independent problem-solving. What makes Code Mentor an agent is that it decides what hints are helpful, which are too revealing, and what details are important to remember in your conversations.
Why use Code Mentor?
It is designed to help you with your coding learning journey, unlike ChatGPT or Claude. Claude very explicitly is focused on providing value through code generation, with claims that the majority of their API usage is for coding purposes. It is being trained to correct and complete code, which means it is taught to give you the answer if you ask it what is wrong with this code. OpenAI hasn’t as openly stated their intentions, however we can see in how they market some of the latest models as being designed for code and logic that they too are honing in on a similar value proposition. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you aren’t trying to actually learn.
To be clear, Code Mentor is powered by OpenAI’s GPT 4o-mini. But Stew, you just said ChatGPT is bad at this! Yes, this is why I designed Code Mentor to specifically be good at being a helpful teacher. If you were to give ChatGPT your question, you will get an answer back, generally with your code completely corrected and a basic explanation. Claude does have explanatory mode, which will return a corrected code block and a more verbose explanation of what was wrong, how it fixed it, and what concepts to understand. Code Mentor works by solving the problem, and then using the answer as content it is not allowed to use in response.
Code Mentor is also incredibly inexpensive to use. You may be used to the $20/month AI subscription, but Code Mentor uses the OpenAI API for access to 4o-mini. The API pricing for it is $0.15 per 1 million input tokens and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens. To give you an idea of how inexpensive it is to use, my entire development of Code Mentor used about $1 in API costs. The other benefit of using the API is that it’s not ‘use it or lose it’ money. It is a credit that is there whether you use it in a month or not, unlike a monthly subscription. Students can take advantage of both the low cost nature and paying only when using it.
Using Code Mentor
If you want to use Code Mentor all you need to do is make an account and then you can start using it! I have locked it behind my Auth0 service because there are user specific features, and I haven’t developed userless functionality. It is currently free to use as well, which is another great reason to start using Code Mentor. I have put $60 into an OpenAI account to be used in $10/month intervals until it runs out. If you decide to use it PLEASE do use the feedback functionality to help me make code mentor even better. I’d also love to hear what you have to say about it, so there is also a contact form at the bottom of the Code Mentor page.
Patch Notes for JustStewIt.com v3.0.0
- Created Agents section of website
- Added Code Mentor agent to website
- Upgraded recipes page
- Better caching
- Enhanced search capability
- Upgrade projects page
- Reformatted the main projects page layout to include a featured project
- Plenty of new recipes are available on /recipes pages, and are constantly updated between versions