freeCodeCamp adds Socrates, an AI hint tool, to its lessons
Learners who are stuck on a freeCodeCamp challenge can now ask Socrates for a hint. freeCodeCamp said its forum will now focus on discussion rather than questions and answers.
freeCodeCamp said on 4 November 2026 that learners on its free coding curriculum can now get hints from an AI tool called Socrates.
Quincy Larson described the tool in a post on the freeCodeCamp news site. He said Socrates first looks through the thousands of hints and test cases that freeCodeCamp staff have written. A test case is a small check that shows whether a learner's code does what the challenge asks. If none of those fit, Socrates writes a new hint.
Since most people will be getting unstuck using Socrates, we think far fewer people will need to ask for help on the forum.
freeCodeCamp's code page for Socrates on GitHub says the tool receives the learner's code, the challenge description and the tests that are failing. It then returns a hint that points towards the fix without giving the solution. The page lists separate prompts for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Python. Its default AI model is openai/gpt-oss-20b.
For learners, freeCodeCamp said Socrates is live now and can be used inside the lessons at freecodecamp.org/learn. The post also said the freeCodeCamp forum is now focused on discussion rather than questions and answers. freeCodeCamp said it expects most learners to get unstuck with Socrates. It wants the forum used for talk about hobbies, studies and goals.
The post did not say whether there is a limit on how many hints a learner can ask for. It also did not say how freeCodeCamp checks the hints that Socrates writes for mistakes.
Sources
- freeCodeCamp Introducing Socrates and the New freeCodeCamp Forum
- freeCodeCamp on GitHub freeCodeCamp/socrates