2025 was supposed to be the year coding became obsolete. AI coding assistants got smarter. “Vibe coding” entered the lexicon. Every other LinkedIn post declared that programming skills were dead, “just describe what you want, and ChatGPT will build it for you.” And while AI is fundamentally changing how we code, build, and learn, the data tells a different story about what skills actually matter.
As 2025 comes to a close, we looked at our enrollment data to see which skills Codecademy learners prioritized. Here are the new courses that took off, the classics that held strong, and the hidden gems learners loved most.
Top new courses of 2025
First, the fresh releases. These courses launched in 2025 and took off with learners looking to level up in emerging areas like agentic AI and vibe coding.
UX Designer Career Path
As AI makes building products faster, the real differentiator is user experience, which is the human-centered design discipline that deals with the holistic experience around a product or service. The UX Designer career path teaches you all of the skills you need to design interfaces people love to use. You’ll learn user research, wireframing, and visual design principles using industry tools like Figma, with hands-on projects that mirror real-world design processes.
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Intro to Vibe Coding
Dig into vibe coding the right way, by mastering AI-assisted coding tools and learning when to use them effectively on everything from brainstorming projects to building applications from scratch. This course addresses the real question: not if you should use AI coding assistants, but how to use them without becoming dependent on tools you don’t understand.
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Learn Intermediate C++
Build on your foundational C++ knowledge with object-oriented programming, advanced data structures, and performance optimization techniques that are used in game development and embedded systems. While high-level languages get the hype, the systems that power games, trading platforms, and hardware still run on C++ (and intermediate skills separate hobbyists from professionals).
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Learn Intermediate C#
Build cross-platform applications with C# and the .NET framework, mastering skills like ASP.NET and LINQ while gaining expertise in the language that powers Unity, one of the world’s most-used game engines. C#’s versatility across web, mobile, and game development makes it a strategic choice for developers who want one language that can do it all.
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Principles of Data Literacy
Understand how statistics inform conclusions, how design shapes data storytelling, and what kinds of analysis you can perform on datasets. AI can surface insights in seconds, but understanding what those insights mean — and whether to trust them — still requires human judgment.
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Build Deep Learning Models with PyTorch
Learn to build, train, and deploy neural networks using PyTorch, the framework behind state-of-the-art AI models from text and image classification to transformer-based architectures. If you’ve been using AI tools and wondering how they work, this is where you learn to build them yourself rather than just prompting someone else’s model.
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Learn How to Build AI Agents
Conversational AI is table stakes now — the competitive advantage is building agents that can actually execute tasks, make decisions, and operate independently without constant human intervention. In this course, you’ll design patterns and core components of autonomous AI systems, from prompt engineering for agentic tasks to building end-to-end workflows in Python.
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Learn Python Developer Tools with VS Code
Set up a professional development environment, master debugging techniques, and implement test-driven development using Python’s unittest framework. Writing code is one thing — knowing how to troubleshoot when it breaks, validate that it works as intended, and catch bugs before they reach production is what separates beginners from working developers.
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Learn Explainable AI
Build on your machine learning foundation with advanced techniques like SHAP, LIME, and feature importance analysis to interpret how models make decisions. This is an intermediate course (with 4 prerequisites) that’ll teach you what’s happening in the black box. Things like, why AI models made a specific prediction, how to debug unexpected behavior, and how to prove to stakeholders that the model isn’t biased.
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The 5 most popular courses
And the overall winners? These courses pulled the most learners in 2025, regardless of when they first launched.
Learn Python 3
Python remains the go-to language for data science, machine learning, automation, and just about everything else. Ironically, Python powers the AI tools people thought would replace coding.
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Learn HTML
Every website, every app interface, every digital experience starts here. HTML is the foundation that doesn’t go away, no matter how sophisticated the build tools get.
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Learn JavaScript
The web runs on JavaScript, and that’s not changing. Whether you’re building interactive interfaces or working with modern frameworks, this is where you start. (And fun fact: TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, was the most-used language on GitHub this year.)
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Learn Java
Enterprise systems, Android apps, backend infrastructure—Java quietly powers more of the digital world than most people realize. It’s the workhorse that keeps running.
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Learn SQL
Data is everywhere, and someone needs to know how to query it. SQL remains the universal language for working with databases, and AI hasn’t changed that.
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