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There's a supposed Duolingo Slack screenshot going around Twitter with an internal announcement: https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1

Archived here: https://archive.is/zqk5z

If I was an engineer at a company that made this announcement I would not be feeling great right now. The claims that writing code will become a smaller part of our jobs and that productivity expectations will rise set off some alarm bells.

Some of the statements like "For example, we know that large language models work best with context" are alarming, as if the people writing this announcement have a very elementary understanding of how LLMs work but are making drastic policy changes based on their limited understanding.

Imposing rules on developers like the requirement that they use AI for every task, no matter how small, and work through LLMs first instead of writing code feels like an idea that comes from non-developers looking to make a thought leadership splash. Everyone I know who leverages LLMs uses them as an assistant where appropriate, but trying to go full vibe-code mode where you act through the AI isn't a secret route to more productivity.

This comment is proudly and innovatively AI-first.

It was written with 10% higher expectations, 10% higher bar (it was raised in a transformative way) and 10% fewer sloppy thoughts, by a rockstar 100x commenter who uses enterprise AI to blast their KPIs through the pipeline each day.

Sometimes they even circle back to blast their pipeline several times in the same day, all thanks to AI.

Venture capital accepted by Venmo and Apple Cash. Past performance is not indicative of financial statements. GAAP statements may be disrupted and revolutionized at the sole discretion of the company. T’s and C’s apply.

Have wonderful AI day! :)

> Productivity expectations will rise (from the screenshot)

This should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise, and if they can’t provide that, get rid of them.

In the short term, I fear the most useful application of AI is as a bargaining chip in favor of upper management. That is because while AI might not be able to replace development, it makes developers compete against perceived alternative that doesn't take wages or healthcare. The whole ~80% as good for 10% of the cost philosophy etc.

> It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise

What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better?

> What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better?

You just covered exactly that.

The headline already rubbed me the wrong way, but seeing this made me immediately cancel my Duolingo subscription. I encourage others to do the same.

Duolingo sucks anyway, it's become a gameified mess, rather than actually teaching necessary grammar and language concepts.

It's actually stunning how off-putting it is. I started Duolingo because I was in a relationship with someone and wanted to learn their language. I paid for subscription because I didn't want to be assaulted with ads and upsells (and I believe in paying for software in general and I think subscriptions can be a fair business model), but even as a paying customer it was miserable!

It's so fucking lousy with gems and upsells and quests and "try the AI call, you get one for free and then you can upgrade to a more expensive subscription!". The gamification of everything in Duolingo is so bad. And, as you say: I feel like I'm wasn't learning any of the fundamentals, can't you just tell me how to conjugate this verb and then testing me instead of making a dumb guessing game out of it?

Compare it to (say) YouTube Premium: I know a lot of people hate it, and that it's an expensive subscription, but I honestly think it's pretty fair. All the commercialization and upsell go away entirely, you get a very clean experience for something that I use more than any other streaming service. Don't mind paying for it at all. Not Duolingo though, I cancelled it after a week and a half.

mine just expired last week. have been considering renewing it. looks like i won't be renewing after all

Why? I don’t see anything wrong with an AI first approach. I think it’s a good way to cover your bases before actually diving into coding.

That is why I try to steer away projects whose ultimate goal is to remove people jobs, automatic cash out systems, AI, ecormerce sites for big retail chains that close down their physical shops, ....

Duolingo are not the only ones, I am aware of a project where the whole translation team for internal trainings was replaced by AI automatic translation of training materials.

Any developer that celebrates AI vibe coding, is going to get some bad vides in the coming years.

This will be one of the defining features of politics in the next decades I predict. I'm coming around to the belief that yes, AI will unlock productivity for some use case. I ask more productive sure, but for who?.

Wages have lost their relationship with productivity for some time, and while the gains will be privatized, the costs (energy grid, Data center land use, and the carbon emissions) will be born by us all.

Oh 100%. As far as I am concerned, anybody that has touched that stuff is blacklisted and radioactive.All its gonna take is a little prick and the financing on the whole house of cards falls apart.

So don't think my hostile opinion towards developers that are involved in using AI to abuse their fellow humans is going to be remotely rare in the future. All the necessary preconditions are already there and the only reason it hasn't been noticed yet is because the people that fucked up are still able to get jobs at companies riding AI funding to do AI work.

Look what happened to a lot of the crypto bros. Now multiply that by 10 and the amount of nasty shit they were doing to other workers by 10 and I don't think people are going to take it as lightly as a lot of the crypto bros got off, which was usually just a black mark and severe down leveling when they came back to work at actual companies.

> Imposing rules on developers like the requirement that they use AI for every task, no matter how small, and work through LLMs first instead of writing code feels like an idea that comes from non-developers looking to make a thought leadership splash.

Or trying to write an earnings call headline. The more you mention how much you use AI, the higher your share price climbs!

Well, even the so called best model, o3 makes huge errors, there is a lot of bark in these models, but enough bite. So if and when they see the AI is a bit less than what people project it to be, they might begin cutting back on ambitious plans.

It comes from the idea that plenty of people don't like to explore and try things out.

When I ask my collueges than you have the few enthusiasts and then the rest.

The announcement sounds like 'start learning to use These tools' not vibecoding

I've tried them, and say without a doubt, that I hate them. I've never even really been a fan of intellisence.

I hated co-pilot, it kept guessing and then I ended up spending more time reading and altering.. It took me out of the zone.

I think this is a common gameplay from companies which are basically reaching their peak of what they will be able to do, but they have to keep growing somehow. Duolingo is basically a dying company if you think about it, like the growth is done, the other company which recently made news, Shopify is another one of these. You do not see them 10xing their revenue in any way again, so they have to play all of these games to squeeze more from the company by basically cutting people, and these are all steps to that goal. I would expect again other companies like Dropbox to also follow a similar path.

[dead]

In another news, I intend to uninstall duolingo effective immediately and actually in an effort to support human-first businesses and enroll into a real language course class where I get to talk to real human beings with same goal and have actual exams and people trained in teaching particular language.

For me, Duolingo(uber for Anki flash cards of preliminary words for a 3 day tourist in a new country) was always an odd product. It is very popular among people because they can immediately learn how to say hi/hello, thanks, please in new language but after that, it is akin to learning to swim by reading different tips and tricks, without actually ever touching water or doing the act.

I've just uninstalled the app and deleted the account (sadly, I have some relatives still stuck on a yearly subscription) after having used Duolingo for years (almost 2000 days streak) and finished multiple languages (English, German, Polish, Esperanto).

Duolingo was quite an innovative platform years ago, it really led me to keep learning, but now all that's gone. I managed to save every single sentence in the last language I was learning, which I can now import into Anki, so the ad bloat won't be a problem anymore.

They can push their greediness far and beyond, until the extent they find suitable, I won't be part of that.

I found it unusable due to the overbearing gamification when I just wanted to learn a language.

I stopped enjoying Duolingo when they took away the tree and made it a singular route on the path. I used to like jumping around on the tree in a more flexible fashion whereas the path feels so boring and forced.

And all the other apps copy them :( Like HelloChinese (new course), LingoDeer, SuperChinese, etc.

The gamification is the #1 reason I uninstalled it within a few days.

People like it because they are lazy and don't need to put effort into it. But the truth is, no effort, no learning.

As someone who waffles back and forth between how conversational I am based on the topic and how much I've studied recently, this comes as no surprise.

Nothing about Duolingo gives the impression they actually want you to learn the language. It presents itself as an easy way to start, but if you are more than a single undergrad class into the language and have used any outside resources, it's an obvious waste of time.

Everything on the platform is just a slower form of the most basic note cards. Anki does everything the platform does faster. Anki isn't suitable for all task but Duolingo takes the basic note card and makes you learn at a slower pace.

It's gamified Anki with social pressure.

If finding proper Anki decks for languages wasn't such a massive pain in the ass (Along with navigating the weird 30€ mobile apps for it, are they official, are they not? Can a free alternative do the same?), people would use Anki a lot more.

With Duolingo you can just install, launch, pick a language and get going.

Anki is literally free on android. I made my own deck but there are plenty to go around. People spend so much energy making excuses for not learning a language that could be spent on... Just fucking getting on with it!

I don’t have the time to “make my own deck”. The UI for Anki is janky at best.

I seriously tried making a deck for my kid for math and holy shit it was a chore and a half.

The same with trying to find a deck for a specific language, no luck there.

For iOS there are about a dozen “Anki” apps? One for 30€, the rest have some kind of in-app purchases.

I’ll rather pay for Duolingo

The problem is once people pay for a service or invest time on learning a free platform, they will irrationally defend their decision to the point it’s almost impossible to get good recommendations on language learning tools online. Few people really tried multiple platforms fully (it takes years) to the point they are able to make criticism fairly about long term effect (which is the important point).

The SRS approach with cards content made by yourself is more time consuming but works better long term due to the context from which you created the cards, but it takes some time to understand the process correctly (not only the software interface, but how it interfaces with your own memory).

There are also other SRS platforms other than Anki, but Anki gets all the floor space because of its sheer number of users (popularity). Some may be better.

Thank goodness we have people like you to enlighten us! :-)

The 24€ one is the official one:

> AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development.[1]

You could always use the web UI in your phone browser, Ankiweb[2], which is very kindly hosted for free by the developers.

You could also write your cards as CSV, HTML, or really any format you want and import them, if the interface isn’t to your liking. Shoot, you can even use an Emacs package[3] if you want to.

[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://ankiweb.net/ [3] https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki

From the Anki search on iOS App store:

One is made by AnkiApp Inc. (28€-99€ IAP subscription)

One by Ankitects Pty Ltd (30€)

Which one is the official one?

The problem isn't the format of the source, I COULD write it in windows .ini -files. The point is that I want to learn the language, not spend time writing the book about the language first. How do I know what words to add to the deck? Should I add different inflections? How about pronouns, does the language use gendered pronouns? What's the best way to study them, are there rules for it?

I'm willing to pay money for a properly researched and made Anki deck for a language rather than spend time building it word by word.

> What's the best way to study them, are there rules for it?

The best way to study is to make a basic card and just start doing it immediately. A lot of this is individual so using other people's tips isn't going to work (although if you really wanted to do this, you would have very quickly learned by now that there's a whole industry of blog posts and youtube videos and Opinions on how to optimize your deck if you really need that, and there's a whole industry trying to sell you on things to buy to Optimize your Learning Experience). The thing is, overthinking isn't going to work here.

Just make a 2 field note, like the default, and start adding words and doing reviews. You'll very quickly find out what information you find yourself wanting to remember when you're sat there writing sentences in the language, you'll also find out what you find interesting to learn that helps you learn. After the point that you are actually learning, it's really easy to add fields to a note or to switch note types.

Not only are there literally a ton of docs that come with Anki that go over the best way to deal with Anki for learning, but making the deck as you go is ideal for your situation because you're building memory. Inputting sentences and words or whatever you find meaningful to remember into the deck is also building that memory. Spending hours reading blog posts and figuring out which service to pay for, uh, is the opposite of learning.

This might sound harsh, but it literally comes down to "you have to walk to learn how to walk, you have to pedal to learn how to ride a bike". Spending hours or weeks or months deciding if you want to do training wheels or not, what height you want the bike seat, route planning, finding the best bike and the best seat — none of that is riding the bike, all of it is based on preferences that you won't have until you've ridden your first bike, and every inch of it is overthinking and procrastination. Nobody can tell you, beforehand, what the best way to ride a bike is, and that information is meaningless to you until you are physically riding the bike. Nobody can tell you what riding a bike is like and there is no way to learn outside of you physically sitting down on the bike, and pushing off, and pedalling — which is something you can do with a 20$ bike that you found at goodwill. You can, however, find yourself wasting hours or weeks or months thinking about riding a bike and never doing it.

To me this sounds more like "you need to learn how to build a bike before learning how to ride it" :D

I'd rather just buy a pre-made bike from a store.

The process of making decks and the SRS features Anki provides are some of the most effective ways to learn language (particularly vocab) behind learning (grammar) from books and language exchange with a teacher/native speaker.

Duolingo is incredibly limited. If you are serious about learning a language, you should look elsewhere. Duolingo is only a good investment of money if you want to pay for a video game with minute levels of learning in the background. It's sort of like playing Sid Meirs Civilization to learn history.

You are cooked.

> If finding proper Anki decks for languages wasn't such a massive pain in the ass

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks

The difficulty, obviously, is in finding out which decks are good and which aren't. But that's a discoverability problem that is hard to avoid since people are just going to have different requirements and preferences. You can try going by the ratings or check language learning subreddits for recommendations, but ultimately it's up to you to try out decks and see if they work for you. If you just use Duolingo instead, you're arguably not using a better deck, just one with better marketing.

It's selling a lifestyle change, and one which is "easy" and fun.

Once you're hooked in, they gamify everything to make you feel like you're doing well. There's the leaderboards, the daily streaks, the ba-ding every time you rearrange 7 word tiles into the only possible sentence that makes any sense.

Go and look at the Duolingo subreddit. When I looked a few years ago, it's just people showing off their 3000+ day streaks.

Anki is a better tool, but its not as polished. Duolingo hooks people with all the little gamified bits, the animations, and it's self-fulfilling popularity loop. Unfortunately being polished is genuinely an incredibly important feature for the majority of people.

How could you replicate all the speaking & hearing exercises with note cards? I can't imagine how that would work.

The Anki deck I'm using for common Japanese phrases has audio embeds that I can listen to and repeat.

Right, so if the productivity gains were so blindingly obvious and immediate for everyone, mandates wouldn't be needed.

These companies tried to quantify the productivity impact of work from home, so it's utterly bewildering to me that they would push these tool-use mandates without actually quantifying the impact LLM tools have on productivity. If it were just 'getting familiar' with AI tools to help define an AI-driven product mindset, I'd expect these CEOs to have more than a naive perception of the tools and their limitations.

I honestly wonder where these mandates started--part of me feels like this is the nascent stage of a VC panic that their AI investment strategy might not work out.

I think, we need to step back a little in these discussions. We need to ask, what productivity gains are we hoping to find?

In any knowledge or specialised work, operating a tool faster does not give great results, rather raises the risk of error and quality decline.

Did duolingo once face existential threat because they failed to produce specific feature sometime? Did one of their feature suffer and cause user loss because it took more time for an engineer to write the actual code?

Additionally, beyond formatting and obvious logical errors, every new code should in theory need some human review, which means more automated code means longer review. Assuming code is now produce at 2x, it also balances out that review will now take 2x. Additionally review is much more mentally taxing than putting out one’s thought into code, so risk of bugs and security holes also increases in the long term.

While Software devs cost money, the job involves thinking, and that means it can’t be compared to factory work where someone is standing at next step to simply drill a screw in spotX and the next person will simply put on a cover. Despite years of effort, the attempt to make the process mirror factory floor(did anyone notice the open floor parallel to factory floors?) it failed.

While many hate to see it this way, just like a surgeon will take his time to perform a brain/heart/tumor surgery, a SWE will do thinking, planning, coding and reviews. Giving a surgeon an autonomous bot that can spread the incision area faster or perform the incision faster does not mean productivity gain, it just means the doctor still needs to plan where to make the incision, how much to spread, what to chop off, what to avoid.

> […] push these tool-use mandates without actually quantifying the impact LLM tools have on productivity

The way I have seen this “measured” is by asking (demanding) people to pull some “time saved” number out of their ass. That number is then taken as fact, without question. So the measurable productivity gains are all based on coerced people making things up, omitting instances of the LLM tools slowing things down. It’s a house of cards, and it’s going to fall after a few more months of empty promises without results. “You claimed 300% more productivity, but delivered the same amount of work, and took on this massive AI bill. What the fuck are you doing?”

LLMs are cool, but they aren’t magic. This shit is exhausting, just skip to the part where you fire a bunch a software engineers, because that’s clearly what you actually want to do :/

> “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

It’s hard to fathom why this would be the case. Isn’t creating learning materials mostly an upfront task? Obviously you want to update your materials and fix mistakes. And perhaps you sometimes have a new idea that necessitates an update or rewriting things. But creating lesson materials honestly seems like it would scale very well.

I think about reading language learning blogs and forums and people would sometimes recommend favorite resources that were from decades ago. I’m sure something was lost in them not being totally up to date but honestly, persistence is way more important than currency, let alone “having a massive amount of content.”

You are right, it doesn’t make sense. If that was a real reason then why not augment their current staff with AI tools to “scale content to more learners” and still have a sense of quality and human touch.

Encrappification at play.

Revenue is down… We need to cut costs… doesn’t sound cool.

You are missing a key point.. What is duolingo's success measured on? Not on how well their customers learn (they have already paid at this point).. but how much content is there (This number directly correlates to the signups). I am sure there are numbers around the subscribers vs regular content consumers and that ratio is tiny.

For a lot of these kind of apps, quantity is the quality in itself.

I suppose it sorta makes sense, if you think of it as a free mobile game model, where the goal is to make more money by get more people to pay (and especially by getting the whales to pay more) and to do that you need new daily or weekly content. Although, I feel like that model scales just fine with humans creating the content.

I hope they can replace their customers with AI next, because that’s the only way a business like Duolingo is going to survive. My prediction is it’s gone in the next 18 months.

A policy change like this is designed to have a thin veil of innovation (especially to an unsavy board) but if you read between the lines this is some executive’s wild idea to shake things up because they are completely and totally desperate and really don’t know what to do.

"I hope they can replace their customers with AI next"

But that is the final stage - AI producing digital content, AI consuming digital content, AI writing code, AI reviewing this code, AI arguing with AI on social media.

No human needed, only numbers growing.

A lot of naysayers here, and I get it’s more about the tactics and messaging more than anything else— but in defense of Duolingo (I’m not a user):

There is a good possibility that in 5 years people have moved on from Duolingo because new ai tutoring apps that can perfectly tailor content to your level and offer unlimited speaking practice sessions, may surpass Duolingo’s “old-fashioned” offering—-the same way Duolingo jumped ahead of websites, which jumped ahead of CDs and cassette tapes, which jumped ahead of books.

This, responding in natively fluent speech and immersion and personalized correction, is what I hope Duo is saying by saying that they are going to rely on AI. Their current system just sets people up to fail at language acquisition.

chatGPT voice app can already talk in languages Duolingo doesn't have and will never have on their old path.

They obviously had to do this. It is already over for Duolingo. All we really need is some kind of Anki deck generator with audio and that plus the language model to have conversations with, it is over. They will look like a childish relic of the past.

Grammar lessons are also critical, especially well spaced for when you need to learn them.

Ironically Duolingo removed all of that in the simplification and gameification recently.

Related ongoing thread:

LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035 - April 2025 (290 comments)

It's pretty funny reading https://www.quora.com/What-made-Luis-Von-Ahn-start-Duolingo/... now:

> So, the largest part of the market was not being addressed because there was no great way to make money from them. Most people who wanted to learn a language couldn't really afford the best ways of doing it. We wanted to have a way to teach people languages for free. But not just free.

> We wanted to have the best quality of language education, and offer it for free.

Modern Duolingo feels like neither half of that sentence.

500 days on Duolingo and it has felt like it was produced by ChatGPT 3.5 this entire time.

500 days of learning various bits & pieces and not being able to have a simple conversation - but I could probably say "There is a monkey in his backpack" if pressed hard!

I used to hate learning from actual textbooks as the conversations felt "dumb" or "forced" but that dumbing down as at least justified by having to progress from zero. Duolingo doesn't feel "plain dumb" but "weird dumb".

So yeah, if they replace their contractors (who must've used the cheapest models) with O3 or o4-mini-high or whatever, it should be an improvement!

If Duolingo wants to be an "AI-First" company, then what's stopping all of us from being an "AI-First" society and just using Google Translate all the time?

This contradicts the whole thesis statement of their company -- that it is worth time and effort to collaborate and learn with others, even when a machine can make it easier.

Number of people I know that used Duolingo successfully to be fluent in a new language: 0

Number of people I expect to meet in the future that used "AI first" Duolingo that successfully became fluent in a new language: 0

They don't even really have a functional product to begin with. Meaning that it can take the average person and help them competently speak a new language in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding I guess can't make it any worse....

I get that it's popular to slag on Duolingo, especially in language-learning communities, but Duolingo is great for getting people started.

I'm fluent in French and immigrated here about a decade ago, and I wouldn't have done that if not for Duolingo. It didn't get me anywhere close to fluent itself (Assimil was the single best resource, but no one resource can you get you to fluent), but it got me started and it got me committed. For that, I'm grateful.

There's something wrong with Duolingo in a way that I can't quite put my finger on it. I always feel like I'm learning to answer its questions and not learning the language. A key assumption of the app is that to answer its questions correctly you need to learn the language, but somehow I don't believe that's the case.

You're learning words and random phrases like "My uncle takes his plants for a walk every week".

Not stuff that's actually useful.

But it still builds vocabulary and is better than nothing for the price.

A lot of the time, you aren't even learning how to translate the sentence. It's more like you've recognised basic sentence structure (in your own language) and managed to make a sentence from:

plants for week walk My every uncle takes a his

Knowing what a sentence in the target language ought to feel like is very useful, though. You're learning what order the words go in, how to match genders, how to express different tenses, where to put prepositions, and so forth; the point is not to memorize the specific sentences but to absorb the structure of the grammar.

When learning languages the things you should learn first are food, health and shelter.

Just by knowing a few key phrases in the main categories and the probable answers to those in a language will help you get by a lot better than "I like to ride my bicycle in the rain on the weekends" :D

Functional fluency over grammatical competence.

Thanks - that's not a perspective which had ever occurred to me. I just assumed that learning a new language would require a long period of steady practice, and that's what Duolingo seems to be built for; but if people are often approaching it looking for something more like a glorified tourist phrasebook, I can see why they might complain about the abstract nature of the practice sentences.

It's the same as Tinder. The business isn't about getting you dates, the business is selling you the fantasy of getting a date. Those two things are different, but for a new user, difficult to distinguish. Duolingo offers you the fantasy of speaking a new language.

Of course it is possible to learn a language using Duolingo, just like it is possible to get dates on Tinder, but it's just not a good method. If you're new to learning foreign languages, you'd be better off signing up for a course (but that costs time and money), and if this is your n-th foreign language, then you'd rather get a book and some boring flashcard app.

Part of the problem might be that no one wants to pay anymore. I'm happy to pay for a course, but there is not a single in-person language course in my city left for the language I wanted to study.

I booked the the single remaining one last year and shortly before the start they announced they will not run it anymore and instead do online classes only. Apparently the rent is too high and it just isn't viable anymore.

It sucks all around :/

This comment dips into the uncanny valley or sadly plant. It's possible 10 years ago it did help you but there's nothing about the current product that would have.

I use Duolingo to learn French, for a few years already. It definitely can bring you up to A1/A2-levels of proficiency (at least for French), which is definitely a solid starting point to engage with the language further. In my case, I've started to take weekly evening-courses. If I started another language, I probably would start again with Duolingo for the super basic stuff, then start to learn vocabulary with Anki, and then start with some paid, organized course that guides me through the more complex parts.

I still use Duolingo almost daily to have some continuous language exposure, for which I still find it useful (especially as the gamification helps with staying engaged). It has its limitations but it does help me. Just to give a bit of a counterpoint; I find your statement a bit overly broad.

If Duolingo hired someone to be a plant and post under his real name on HN for over a decade just so one day he could make a lukewarm endorsement of the product in a reply to another comment, I'd have to question their business sense.

On the other hand, the plant is an amazing salesman.

It actually made me able to watch shows in Spanish. It just happened as a result of me doing Duolingo basically like a game.

I was still in the middle of Spanish course when I realize I can sorta kinda watch and understand some shows, so I watched. (The watching itself then made me progress mucj further, but it would not happen without duolingo).

I love that whenever duolingo is mentioned all the armchair educational psychologists come out of the woodwork claiming that duolingo sucks because it's too easy or too much like a game.

One of the most valuable determinants for learning a new language is regular practice. Answering 30 easy exercises correctly will do more for your language skill than 10 hard exercises of which you only answer 5 correctly.

And easy questions have the added benefit of being less tedious and convincing more people to stick to the app.

It was easy, as a French speaker, to pick up a little Spanish for the holidays.

To be honest though, the main thing that puts me off isn't the teaching quality (which is basic/so-so) but the plethora of weird patterns to keep you hooked. I don't buy the "we want you to succeed" justification. Streaks, streak freezes, begging notifications - anything to keep you looking at ads I guess.

It's a game. Think of DuoLingo as a fun introduction, a springboard for serious language learning. People I know who use it have fun, but by no means are advanced in whatever language their learning.

I am fluent in spanish, and duolingo was really helpful at the beginner stage. When I was beginning to learn. I think between living in mexico (total immersion), consuming spanish media only, and about an hour of duolingo every night it was a tremendous boon. Mostly for learning to spell/remember gender nouns, and learning vocabulary.. I have tried other apps but the gamification also helps.

I have now been speaking spanish for 9 years and have no use for duolingo when it comes to spanish, but I always recommend it as a resource to level up when you are a beginner.

Duolingo never even claimed they teach up to fluency. How much they promiss depends on language, but most developed one ends with B1.

The fluency complaint is completely nonsensical. There is no in person class that would make you fluent, there is no textbook that would make you fluent.

It is possible to criticize Duolingo, but the fluency claim kind of show you don't know what you talk about.

I hope that this backfires asap before turning into a bigger problem.

I happen to have a Duolingo account, and was once a customer. I will send an angry message to their support team of AI robbots and hope it gets carried up to the top.

I'm joking btw, not going to actually waste my time doing that.

> Number of people I know that used Duolingo successfully to be fluent in a new language: 0

But they say they're "the world's best way to learn a language," right there on their homepage: https://www.duolingo.com.

So either no one has ever successfully become fluent in a foreign language (because not even the best tool can be used to successfully accomplish the task), or the tech industry is full of liars and its claims cannot be trusted.

"I read their marketing copy and it says they're the best"

Just be thankful for all the companies destroying their "products" in favour of AI. They show that they won't be worth it in the future. A lot of companies will go away, and it won't be the ones "missing out" on "AI"... most of them will be the ones who cripple their product for some pseudo hype.

It just shows they have no idea what to do, so just squeeze "AI" in... there are too many SaaS out there anyway.

If people wanted that, they could just ask an LLM to be their language coach. The big issue is that with a foreign language, you cannot really verify that anything the model gives you is correct. And with how LLMs work, the wrong answers will look very convincing. I don't think that's a good idea.

This is begging the question a bit, but yep. We all have access to LLMs, so why do we need a middleman like DuoLingo taking the output of an LLM and cluttering it up with irrelevant ads?

Do most people using Duolingo have anything to show for it? It's a time wasting online casino app dressed up with intellectual vibes. Not surprising that a spiritually dead company has spiritually dead values.

Duolingo is an awful language learning tool (primary tool or only tool). Here is a Duolingo game.

Translate the following into English:

jvgug5 g54g 4g g45g ! g54 43 43r pgd0f

Here are the words you need to drag and drop into order:

fish to day cat eat My every eat likes

Do 10 of these every day and you'll be fluent when you hit a 1000+ day streak. Do a lot of these to do more of them than other people on the leaderboard to see your name next to "1." with an icon of a trophy.

I don't know, AI seems quite antithetical to what Duolingo supposedly stands for. AI raison d'etre is to allow people to do stuff they cannot do themselves or replace human skill with automated processes. Duolingo literally sells language courses, in a world where translation jobs are getting less and less necessary thanks to AI being especially great at translating stuff.

Also "AI first" is BS, until AI has a 100% accuracy it is only useful as long as there are still competent people around that are able to understand what the AI does. A level of competence that gets harder and harder to get in a world where AI assistants allow you to get by by just pressing enter and producing poor quality slop.

Companies and management want to _replace_ human labour because just they don't understand that AI works best _alongside_ people. This doesn't surprise me; one of the worst problems in IT right now is that IT is both pervasive and extraordinarily sector-specific. Capital is in the hands of people that not only don't understand how IT and computers work in detail, but don't even understand how little they understand in the first place

I already found Duolingo quite bad, struggling to make it past the repetitive and often not-so-sensical question/answers, but this finally proves it’s not for me.

"AI first" has the makings of an Amazon Go situation. You theoretically shed labor spend by using technology solutions but in practice have low-paying workers do most of the actual work. "AI first" just seems like a dog-whistle for "we're struggling to figure out how to grow so we're going to cut labor and make it seem like innovation".

Not a whole lot stopping Duolingo to be replaced entirely by a thousand ChatGPt wrappers

I mean this seems reasonable, but the AI advisory board is likely to get in the way of actual innovation. They'll probably limit what models you can use for nonsense political reasons, and it'll just be another set of signatures you need to get to purchase an AI tool. I think there is a decent amount of logic to this though.

Uh huh and will the employees still feel cared about do you think or will they all feel one step away from being pushed off the cliff

[flagged]

It feels like we're watching the playbook for AI-native companies emerge in real time.

Duolingo’s approach, explicitly tying headcount to proof-of-automation limits, baking AI usage into performance reviews, and prioritizing AI-first systems over retrofitting old workflows, is a glimpse at how "AI-first" won’t just mean using LLMs as a tool, but rebuilding the entire operational model around them.

That said, it's a double-edged sword. Contract workers were crucial to Duolingo’s early scalability. Shifting to AI removes human bottlenecks, but also human nuance — and teaching language is deeply nuanced. It’ll be fascinating (and maybe a little uncomfortable) to see if mass AI content keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling.

AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?

> keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling

Duolingo is widely regarded as more of a game than a high-quality learning experience. People obvious learn something from it, but it's a running joke almost everywhere on social media that people can be 100s of days into their Duolingo streak and still not learn much.

Getting people off of Duolingo and onto less gamified, more rigorous language learning courses is a common theme in the language learning world.

They even explicitly admit to this. In the recent Decoder podcast the CEO said they will always choose engagement and gamification over teaching you the 'best' way.

Which is not a terrible strategy. Most people learning languages are doing it for fun or a new years resolution or whatever. If you're serious about learning a language for real (ie you've moved country) then of course you're gonna go to a more serious platform.

Any resources you’d recommend?

I haven’t used Duolingo in over a decade, but recently I’ve become interested in learning conversational Spanish.

Language Transfer

Massive plus one for Language Transfer. It's well presented, interesting, and kept me engaged. The whole concept is finding connections to language you already know, and gets you thinking in fuller more complex thoughts and sentences really quickly. The audio lessons are free on various podcast platforms / YouTube etc.

>Duolingo's educational quality high

Was duolingo ever known for high educational quality? To me duolingo's main pitch was a way to gamify language learning. Of course it became a victim of its own success as soon as you could "pay to win".

I don't think so. I see its pitch as "the best kind of exercise is the one you do", maybe preferable to playing a game, but not an efficient way to learn. How useful it is to you will probably depend on how effective the sounds and streaks and home screen notification stuff is for keeping you motivated. Personally, I'm motivated by quick progress and outcomes (streaks don't do anything for me), so Anki is actually stickier, though I must be in the minority.

Because they focus so much on beginning learners for whom nuance isn't important, this change doesn't seem like it'll hurt them.

Being successful at Duolingo was always being like that guy who wins scrabble tournaments in French and Spanish without being able to converse in them. It's just a game and winning at it doesn't necessarily align with being functional in it. Otherwise second language schools would have long been extinct by now.

I don't think it was ever known for being high quality, it was known for being "accessible" and then they forgot about what their original goals were. They got pretty disappointing IMO when real languages were in need of updates for a long time (I don't know if the Chinese course ever got features like Stories) while they added a bunch of fictional languages.

Far behind are the days when free version of Duolingo was playable. There are so many dark patterns these days to keep users coming back, gatekeeping something or otherwise to just push them to pay for the usage.

> AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?

It will be a flop. Either it won't get implemented like the C-levels dreamed in the first place and will remain policy on paper only or it will be rolled back quietly once reality hits.

"AI-first" is the "blockchain" of 2025.

Username checks out, no em-dash needed.

I shouldn't be surprised by the number of comments of people saying "I'm going to uninstall Duolingo immediately", but I am.

AI is increasing our productivity just as the loom did back in the early 1800s. So are HN members now the luddites?

We're both the developers and the destroyers?

Why don't we all just go back to coding on punch cards if we're concerned improved productivity will take our jobs?

We need to look at what we're doing, and what we will be doing in the next 10 or 20 years.

Do we know what that will be? No. But should we get out the pitch forks when a company says "we're going to do more with less people because new technology allows us to do that"?

This is probably the wrong way to look at this.

A more interesting question is: why are we doing this? Why are people learning foreign languages?

It can be:

- To interact with other human being -> so just find a language exchange

- Because we are bored -> just find another human being

- To find a job / immigrate in an other country -> but it seems AI will replace this job you are after anyway

It is a bit the same with cars. For a long time I wished we had self driving cars because I was commuting 4, 5, 6 hours a day to earn more.

But what would I do when I will have all that money?

Probably enjoy driving an old analog car or better ride my horse everyday.

Also anybody here eating poison with the dream of growing your own food?

So always look at the big picture and you will see DuoLingo is irrelevant anyway. It is another robotic hamster wheel like Instagram and TikTok.

You are misreading. The declaration effectively does NOT quantify or prove any productivity gain. It simply alludes to a possibility by forcing to adapt a new tool which is frequently sold as productivity gain. There is no real consensus or mass scale data except businesses with executives heavily invested in the AI adjacent stocks or prefer to be called visionaries like how SAP or Adobe got lucky by moving into cloud and subscription model purely by accidentally following random hype.

Also in most software dev task, writing code is rarely if ever the bottleneck, it is the thinking, endless scrum bullcrap, management alignment, architects being too obtuse to not sign off on simpler solutions to protect their prestige, not filling empty roles, pushing teams to extreme and then suddenly deciding to throw away and start something brand new while asking why can’t the thrown away solution be adapted for the new thing or simply consulting/contracting firms intentionally prolonging the project to milk maximum billable hours.

I have actually read the entire screenshot in that tweet and to me it read 50% as non technical executive pitched by some AI vendor about how cool their tools are and 50% of clueless people finding non existent nails for their new hammer.

AI has benefits, it may give productivity gains, specially if you are sweat shops churning out customization of same ERP or wordpress theme. Just repeating productivity gain, coding landscape will change, life will be different 500 times daily because the seller of LLM(calling them the AI wholesale is deceptive, they are subset) wants you to do that, does not magically make those true. The whole trend is sickening and it needs to die.

Replacing SWE is fine, but if SWE can be replaced, the justification can be used to replace crucial things like doctors, lawyers, auditors and lots of other professionals which will kill us all.