Cadence Learn by Cadence
Cadence · Education

Anyone can learn this.

Cadence Learn is free and plain English, built for people who were never told this was for them. Two paths: start by learning to use AI well in ten short lessons, or go straight to building software. No prior experience. No jargon left unexplained.

Start with AI Learn to build software Free · self-paced · beginner-first
Start here

New to all of this? Start with AI.

Ten short lessons, about ten minutes each, that take you from never having really used AI to building something with it. Nothing to install, nothing to buy, and every lesson ends with something you actually did.

Start with AI — ten short lessons

Curious → capable → automating → building. What AI actually is, how to ask it well, how to hand it your own material, how to make it run jobs for you, and how to make something of your own. Then it hands you to the path below.

10 lessons live
Taking a computer science class?

Think like a programmer — the twelve levels before C++

College intro programming courses almost always list an earlier course as a prerequisite — a whole semester of algorithms and problem solving with no programming language in it. If you are walking in without that, this is it: twelve interactive levels, nothing to install, no code.

0

Think like a programmer — twelve levels, no code

Drive a robot that obeys you literally, break a task apart until it is boring, trace a loop by hand, step a real processor, build numbers out of switches, flip truth tables, and hunt a bug only one value can reveal. Every level has a drawn diagram, something you operate yourself, an exercise for two people, and a button that asks an AI for help in your own words.

12 levels live
Then the language

The C++ track — a first computer science course, step by step

C++ in the order a professor actually covers it, starting with the twenty minutes of Mac setup that derails more people in week one than any concept does. All fifteen levels live.

C

The C++ track — fifteen levels, setup to recursion

Get a Mac compiling and agreeing with the college lab, take hello world apart piece by piece, decode the compiler, then the language itself — types, arithmetic, decisions, loops, functions, arrays, strings, files, structs, pointers and recursion. Every level has a drawn diagram and something you operate yourself.

15 levels live
The path

Or go straight to building software

Each module is a self-contained, copy-and-paste guide. Do them in order — you only ever need the one you're on. More are on the way; the first is live now.

Set up your machine

Terminal, Git & GitHub, free Supabase & Cloudflare accounts, and your AI mentor "Ada" — connected and doing the work for you. A true one-time setup.

Live

How the web works

What actually happens between typing an address and seeing a page — clients, servers, requests, APIs. The mental model, in plain English.

Live

Build your first project

From an empty folder to a real web page that's yours — saved to GitHub and, if you like, live on the internet. Built by talking to Ada.

Live

Reading errors & debugging

Things break — that's the job, not failure. How to stay calm, read the clue, and get unstuck every time.

Live

What to learn first

A short, opinionated map of what actually matters early — and what you can safely ignore until later.

In development

Find a mentor

How Cadence pairs new builders with someone a few steps ahead — plus a guide for mentors who want to help.

In development
Why this exists
One of my missions as founder of Cadence is to enable as many young adults as possible to get into software development. Not someday, and not only the ones who already had a laptop and a family friend in tech — anyone willing to start. This is where we hand you the keys.
Peter Lewis, Founder, Cadence
Who it's for

Built for the person starting from scratch

01

Total beginners

Never written a line of code. That's exactly who each guide is written for — nothing is assumed.

02

Self-teachers

You learn by doing, on your own schedule. Copy, paste, run, understand — then move on.

03

Mentors

Helping someone start? Hand them the path and let the guides carry the how, so you can carry the encouragement.

Start with the setup guide
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