I'm on the same boat, negatively affected by AI. I'm the CEO and founder of an EdTech company and our B2C revenue has greatly decreased as a result of Gen AI.
But unlike the author of this post (or cited authors) I'm not sore. AI is providing a much better education model for students. So it's us that we have to adapt, not complain that the world is changing.
For example, in Machine Learning our projects are sometimes extremely long and repetitive. Because before AI, it was a valuable skill to be able to recall APIs quickly (what is the method to drop duplicates in a dataframe again?).
But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to.
Students can now focus on more high level valuable tasks: understand the domain, compare evaluation methods, compare models, balance tradeoffs, present solutions/reports, etc.
It's like in the 50s when students had to memorize tables of logarithms. Nobody misses that.
We are in the process of recreating all our projects to adapt to the new world. We'll see how it goes.
> But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to. Students can now focus on more high level valuable tasks: understand the domain, compare evaluation methods, compare models, balance tradeoffs, present solutions/reports, etc. It's like in the 50s when students had to memorize tables of logarithms. Nobody misses that.
Maybe when it comes to any coding-related learning, I can agree with that point.
However I think the future of education in general is very bleak. When we have plummeting scores for the PISA exam across the world [1], I fear people will get dumber and dumber.
There will always be those who thrive, but the easier it is to obtain information/knowledge, the less I think people have an incentive to do it. And I don't buy that AI will solve all intellectual jobs anyway.
> However I think the future of education in general is very bleak. When we have plummeting scores for the PISA exam across the world [1], I fear people will get dumber and dumber.
This is exactly what AI companies need, so that's development should be celebrated. There are two paths to capture the value that's currently wasted on paying people:
1. Build a system that's superior to nearly all people.
2. Make people worse, so even an inferior system is superior to them.
Getting AI into the classrooms and degrading the educational system are important for path #2.
It's good not to put all your eggs in one basket, so I'm glad the AI industry is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy against their competitors. Who cares about the waste and destruction for humanity, as long the investors get good returns?
PISA exam scores are a lagging indicator with many years of lag. I doubt the reason of that is AI. Mobile phones? Social media? Any other multi causal reason (poor eating, anxiety, low testosterone, whatever), most likely, but not AI.
The pitch is learning useful things (if not skills) but we end up using schools as storage for kids, for indoctrination and as a business model. The ratio gradually changes.
We end up with shit results and where they arent shit students are rushed though as if to prevent them from thinking about the materials.
We have libraries full of unused education formulas. Some 2000 years old. Then there is nutrition, sleep and other work/rest ratios, physical health.
How expect results without learning to teach and learning to learn?
Onto what should one anchor learnings if the suroundings are always the same?
I never hear a word about spaced repetition in school. Its so basic i must conclude they knew nothing about what should have been their area of expertise.
When things get bad enough we will [finally] have reason to improve.
Maybe the great work of Salman Khan is merely a hint?
What a great perspective to have! Completely agree with you and I want to add on to it by saying mentors will always be valuable because students have always had access to information even before AI, if you think about it. It's organizing and packaging it in the right format that's always been the key issue.
" It's organizing and packaging it in the right format that's always been the key issue."
LLms dont help here either.
Part of learning is about struggle. Seems many here want to disregard that fact and just run to the LLM lmao. Yeah you can do that - the knowledge won't really stick.
>But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to.
It's a real shame a leader of an education company doesn't value the actual learning process. Those "low value" processes are the building blocks to understand and master high level concepts. I'm not spending my day to day thinking about the low level memory allocation in my job, but that knowledge and work helps immensely in how I approach the higher level assignments and wider architecture. And I still kick myself because my assembly knowledge is is only 1.5 semester's worth.
And yes, I still look up how to construct an array in C++. Not really because my memory is bad (okay, kind of), but more for the practice of reviewing API's and parameters and maybe making new revelations. I probably knew internally some 12 years ago I could set an initial capacity in one of the array's constructors. I didn't really "understand" the value in that until one random work day 4 years later as I was working through some in-house container packages.
You can even say that doesn't matter if you know what resize() is, but it's those little bits of learning nuggets that builds you up from a "fine engineer" to a "great engineer". Less the knowledge and more the work ethics built to obtain it.
I'm taking courses at my local college (heavy duty diesel tech) and I'm finding how little use the teachers is for me. I got a digital copy of the textbook, and downloaded all the courses notes, pumped that into claude and made a discord bot that generates me quizes, tracks all my progress, and builds me a study guides off the results.
Superior to any teacher I've ever had, no matter how involved they are. I genuinely don't even see what my teacher is needed for beyond a requirement for me to be there. I can ask the bot "can you clarify X section" at 3am and it'll do in 1 second. In class, the teacher reads the slides, adds some extra points and takes questions. But my bot does all this, completely personalized to me.
Times move on, and I don't see teachers surviving. I'm hoping by next year the college will offer an "at home, self paced course" option. Theres no reason for me to be there.
AI is moving fast, so I'm very open to the suggestion that Claude can do today what it couldn't six months ago. But my experience with folks who are learning from AI, historically, has been that they have high confidence in abilities they are not able to demonstrate when asked to show mastery through conventional problem solving.
I teach many data/ML courses for clients using their data. It is amazing how many insights both the students (as SMEs of the data) and the teacher (as an SME of the techniques) can have when going through certain techniques together. Quite often, we get a "those last 5 minutes more than paid for the training" insight.
I think that is possible with AI (I haven't experienced it), but I also feel like most folks use basic/naive/cursory techniques when using AI because they don't know what they don't know.
This has been my experience as well as someone who uses the frontier models quite a bit, I think it's easier than ever to deceive myself into thinking I'm being productive or learning. I've noticed it in others as well.
Part of it is shear volume of "stuff" that I'm doing on the fly while leaning on AI as a crutch for speed (otherwise why wouldn't I just do it myself), the other part is that it's ephemeral, even if you read all the lines of code, it's hard to beat manually typing them yourself for retention _and_ failing at it, and being forced to teach myself what I did wrong.
All that's to say, I think AI psychosis can happen at a group level.
I do, all the time. I get test, do good and then the college signs off that Im a certified mechanic when Im done.
Maybe its more of a critique on the school, but no one tests you on your ability to disassemble an engine and rebuild it. They simply make you write a test based off terms you learned in a textbook.
This was exactly my experience in high school, university, and now the same in college.
I would of killed for this bot during my math courses in university.
reminds me a lot of my learning process. I read fast, seemingly picked up concepts quickly, can answer some sample questions. I felt fairly prepared, and honestly most classes were a breeze with that.
Then, for better or worse, I was pushed to honors and AP classes in high school. The same methods didn't work there. Things got more abstract and I needed to connect multiple concepts together. Math drills turned into word problems that revealed weaknesses in my older math fundamentals. reciting facts from a required reading wasn't enough; I needed to know what that meant and understand the setting of the book.
My grades suffered and you can argue the "academically optimal" way would have been to not take so many advanced classes. But those experiences definitely helped me to critically think better. Eventually (My English and History appreciation would come much later. Math and Science trained me well).
It is also a shame how much the quality of the teacher can affect this experience and perception of education as a whole. I wonder if those enthusiastic to replace the teacher ever had one that fit their needs?
And are you learning whatever you are learning for personal gratification or hoping to use that skill for survival? I am asking because the way I see it, just like the teachers, everyone is becoming useless.
Teachers and schools need to let LLMs do the things they are better at, and concentrate on having instructors do the things that LLMs cannot. Teachers that only read from the slides have always been a problem.
Your instructor should be having you dismantle an injector pump or bleed an air locked injector rail. You can read a book about how to do that, but you won’t really know how to do it until you’ve done it for reall
I thought the same until I had kids. I realized that kids generally want to learn, but they usually think what the teacher is telling them is not the best thing to be learning. No technology, not even AI, overcomes the student's ego; in fact, technology rarely even tries to address that issue. I think this often applies to adults too. Teachers continue to be necessary to help students achieve an appropriate level of humility to be able to learn.
You clearly have enough humility in your field to be able to soak up knowledge. That's great for you! I suggest your dedication is rare and teachers continue to be essential for society.
Formal education has more than just an instructive role. In fact, it's everything but the instruction. Reciting content to learners doesnt necessarily help them learn.
Teaching should turn into conveyance of taste. The teacher should help figure out what needs to be examined and how to examine; help figure out ways to close the gap between the textbook and reality. AI can't do those things well yet, and perhaps it never will be able to.
Sadly, the truth is that in school, you're only rewarded for what you vomit back up on the test. Rote memorize some formulas and facts, copy those back on the test and you're now a certified mechanic/engineer/doctor/whatever. That's exactly what got me through math courses in university.
Sucks, but its true. In my case, if there was a test that required me to disassemble an engine top to bottom, claude would be mostly useless.
In my experience, that was pretty much true until I started doing small discussion-group-style graduate classes. But those are necessarily capped by staff-to-student ratios.
Maybe all education will get more and more similar to e.g. learning an instrument.
You can get everything from YouTube videos, sure. But a good teacher will help with things like knowing how to get a good repertoire for your skill set, what bad habits not to develop that will cripple your ability to learn more complex pieces over time, etc.
I think expertise in hard subjects will only become more and more valuable (as always), and thus harder and harder (and more expensive) to achieve.
We see the same at my university. It's sadly the reality of it.
We are kind of envisioning that university will be a place for social activities, mingling, rich people meeting partners, etc. So we are moving towards more of that.
I have a feeling AI is hitting all the same dopamine receptors as your attention grabbing apps and video games, is highly addictive, and is merely making you feel like you are achieving something. Sort of like DuoLingo.
The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford.
That’s a shame. I’m surprised someone so well versed in web technologies has such a brittle setup. Cloudflare Pages, or if you you’d prefer to stay CDN-less, a $4 VPS, will handle any sort of traffic this blog can reasonably receive.
Founder of Boot.dev here: the industry is absolutely having a VERY rough time in 2026. Our revenue in particular is actually up in 2026 vs 2025, but modestly low double digit percent) vs 2025 being nearly double 2024. That said, I feel we're an exception in that we have been able to grow, mostly due to a complete doubling down on high quality human content, and trying to build experiences you just can't get from plain text (interactivity, animations, etc). time will tell.
I tried creating a similar concept at https://www.codembark.com but felt it would be too hard to monetize with the headwinds of AI. I ended up just getting rid of all of the paywalls and just offering it for free.
But isn't this (interactivity, animations) exactly the kind of stuff someone already familiar with a concept would turn to AI for yet another interactive visualization that might help develop intuition?
That's at least what I do. Sometimes it feels performative at best, other time I get genuinely new ideas by having a vague thought turn into a tweak able viz.
Thanks for boot.dev, it's the one website I regularly point my students to when they ask about places for supplemental programming education. I hope the genAI bubble doesn't put you out of business like it might do for us in traditional academia.
Speaking as someone who never learned well from courses and always preferred documentation and 'just doing it': I wonder how much of this drop is 100% LLM usage by devs vs. devs realizing a lot of video content was just padded out anyway.
The mentioned 2ality blog by Axel Rauschmayer was an extremely detailed and thorough look at TS and JS specs. So right up your alley. Same with Josh W Comeau.
Well as someone who got a ton of value out of tutorials and would go back to the documentation and "just do it," I wonder how much this is really actually just LLMs as we're all seeing out sites bombarded with bots ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I considered myself to be a web developer in the 90s and early 00s. Then things began changing very quickly into something I didn't recognize. I came from an era that did layout with table tags! I felt like an old dog having to learn new tricks. I chose to pivot into statistics rather than adapt, though I've since come back around via data science and systems engineering.
I don't think what's happening is a uniquely AI phenomenon. If it wasn't AI, it was going to be something else. The ground is always shifting beneath you. It's happened to me in multiple fields through my career. You adapt or you pivot. Like a startup.
For many people who feel negatively affected by AI, my advice to them is to do what I did when my professional disciplines changed to something I didn't recognize: pivot. The great news is that AI makes it really easy to be a beginner in a new adjacent field.
I come from the same era. Learning new languages and frameworks is nowhere near the same ballpark as having the whole ground your business was built on pulled out from under you when it comes to "just pivot."
Most of the stuff these Ed-Tech companies taught is counterproductive. Much of it was unnecessary solutions to problems that didn't exist. So so many Web tools are things created because their creator didn't properly understand HTML, JavaSript, CSS and the DOM. Then these schools taught everyone these unnecessary things and they become the standard and made things overly complex and give us massive build times for stuff that was never meant to need a build phase in the first place.
LLMs with HTMX and plain old CSS and JavaScript (maybe Typescript) is the future. Getting back to little to no build times and frontends that don't take up 1+ GB of RAM on the clients
What Ed-Tech companies? This article isn't talking about Ed-Tech companies. Axel Rauschmayer isn't an Ed-Tech company. He's an individual author who wrote books about JavaScript, the language. He wasn't pushing these "unnecessary solutions", he was helping developers understand JavaScript, exactly the thing you say is necessary. Josh W. Comeau isn't an Ed-Tech company, he's an individual who writes content about new CSS features like Anchor Positioning[1]. What do educators like this have to do with 1+ GB RAM frontends?
I've personally been using a Phoenix LiveView-like approach extremely successfully, combined with LLM coding. It is extremely, stupidly fast. We are talking about loading an entire multi-window desktop environment in the web on spotty 5G networks in half a second, transferring less than 1MB of data.
I think traditional web frontends might be dead for any applications with servers that can afford to keep server-side state of a logged-in user.
(Notably this includes almost any kind of AI application, because the LLM costs dwarf the web hosting costs anyway.)
>LLMs with HTMX and plain old CSS and JavaScript (maybe Typescript) is the future.
1. LLM webpages in my experience have definitely not gotten simpler, nor load faster. It just pushes out more of the same junk underneath without any of the oversight we'd give a human
2. I'm not even sure the webpages are the big resource hog anymore. Chromium itself has had the reputation for eating RAM for well over a decade at this point.
3. In many ways, we did this to ourselves. In the name of shipping faster, we (or perhaps the executives) outsourced solutions that would sacrifice the simplicity of the code for "more mainainable, cross platform" frameworks. Electron was a solution for software companies not wanting a dedicated Windows and Mac (and perhaps Linux) team. React was a very specific solution for one of the largest websites in the world, that the rest of the industry adopted as a trend.
This is quite weird that "AI" presumably ruined book sales, since the info from the books were mostly available though the search.
You want it structured? You need the book - "AI" won't solve it for you (well, if we discount cases of word for word reproduction... which we probably shouldn't, but this does not seem to be the argument here).
The kind of people, that read the books, are the kind of people that largely won't settle for a chatbot as a replacement.
Can there be another reason for the sales drop? Unemployment, "death of the junior", wages decline?
Personally, I read way less traditional books when it comes to learning stuff. Especially the “utility”/“tutorial”/“handbook”. Top nitch books talking about general principles I’d still read.
Especially for books that need to teach me a subset of a certain discipline - in the past I’d get 4-5 (or at least samples), and try to find the parts that are of interest to me in a style that fits me. Novadays I’d just ask Claude to explain things in a form that I like, with pretty illustrations from Imgen :)
E.g. I don’t think I’ll read the animal books from O’reilly again. But an equivalend of “Thinking in C++” or “Pearls of programming” of a new field? Sure.
It depends on whether you bought books to learn or bought books to solve.
There are a vast number of books that I purchased not for any interest in the topic, but to solve a particular problem. I have zero interest in understanding Docker. I find it tedious. But I do have a book on it as I did need to know it at some point.
I wouldn’t buy that book today, as AI means I no longer need to know Docker.
> The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.
I know correlation is not causation, post hoc ergo propter hoc etc. etc. But these circumstantial evidence are too strong to simply ignore... As it stands AI is the obvious culprit. And with the current evidence, it is perfectly reasonable to blame AI and nothing but AI.
As an educator and author, I feel Molly's pain (Anthropic owes me $60k for pirated books). My course and book sales have dropped significantly. I feel like much of the value in my book-based knowledge is harder to discover in AI agents. (One example might be inspecting SHAP values from XGBoost models and using that as feedback to feature engineering for a linear model (like Logistic Regression)). So I'm afraid more advanced techniques might go by the wayside in the name of delivery speed.
I use AI both in the cloud (I tend to avoid Anthropic...) and with local models.
I've probably written more code in the past year than in my whole career. I can now create what I desire (I just created a telemark skiing game over the weekend based on my Strava segments). I think this has helped my teaching as well. In a recent ML course, I created many interactive examples that in the past were just doodles on my whiteboard, but are now embedded in the notebooks I give students.
I've also taught a few AI courses to clients as well. However, with the inevitable rust/ASM-ification of everything, I'm not sure how long those skills will be valid. I do, however, think that having a human in the loop for ML and data analysis is still important.
The people reaping AI's benefits today generally developed their skills as juniors through old-fashioned struggling in the pre-ChatGPT era -- actually reading docs and articles, trial and error, puzzling over mysterious bugs, and generally doing lots of mental lifting.
How will skill building happen when LLMs and coding harnesses seemingly provide all the answers at one's fingertips?
That's a great question. I don't know what the future will be like, but looking into my crystal ball, I'm not seeing much hand-generated code. Very little (or no) human code review.
Having the taste and business sense to develop the right thing will be important. If it stops working, ask the AI to fix it.
People here seem incredulous that others would learn from a video series, course, or book, but I've always found this content extremely valuable and would continue learning from them even now. I learned the basics of async programming through learning about AJAX from Jeremy Keith's book on the subject, I dove very deep on JS itself from Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, Cocoa from BigNerdRanch, Much of Swift and SwiftUI from John Sundell's writing, tutsplus, HackingwithSwift, Grid and subgrid from Rachel Andrew's writing. As a largely self-taught programmer, these resources have been absolutely crucial, and in retrospect it was a mistake to conflate the ability to find any information I want in discrete chunks with actually learning parts of a subject. I've also only rarely found University level formal courses to be as substantial in terms of what's actually useful to bring with me into practice. LLMs are more sophisticated in many ways, but if I want to learn something, I need to approach it more seriously than modern tools would have me believe. LLMs are great at letting me skip over the learning part, and they're great at helping me explore the problem space, but they're not what I'd turn to for educating myself on anything I care about, in much the same way that listening to a podcast or watching a documentary does not qualify as education, nor does it replace reading and/or physically practicing something.
Web development, as much as some would like to think, is and has always been, complex.
I haven't tried learning Rust yet, and I'm sure as hell not going to lean on an LLM at all when I do.
I've written for a range of front-end publications. This year they've all cut down the amount they're publishing, started slopping out articles, or gone quiet altogether. It is rough. Speaking as an author, even those that seem 'fine' at a cursory glance now feel strained behind the scenes. It makes me so sad.
I definitely understand the uncertainty and frustration with a field changing beneath you, and the distastefulness of a lot of the content made with agents. But I think this is going to be a short lived sentiment. I only recently started using claude code because my earlier experiments resulted in more time instructing the bot than working with the code.
This time my approach was better and so was the capability of the model. I can make a small change in one place and have the model propagate the change throughout the codebase. I'm still working directly with the code, and the agent doesn't have to make any important decisions about structure (which remain generally terrible). My familiarity with the codebase is the same as if I had made each edit myself.
It is definitely possible to build faster and better with an LLM and not give up control or the enjoyable part of coding. The energy in this space still seems to revolve around guiding the agent or letting it take over, the key is ignoring it entirely and discovering what works for you.
This implies that you know which question to ask. If people don't know about accessibility, security etc. How are they able to learn? Also, most people don't use AI to learn but to do it for them.
That's where books come in. Read them, explain what you're learning to the AI, and what interests you about it, ask for it to check your understanding. Explain your other interests, ask it to suggest other things to read which will bridge the gaps between what you're learning now and the other things you already know.
I mean, the frontier models are pretty damn good at giving you all the standard conventions on things... The first question I usually ask is "give me the all the modern day conventions for this use-case", and then I start the context building from there. This applies to a lot of things, but I mainly use it when I am coding.
the older your brain, the less plastic it is! lets remember what it might have felt like for you to write your first BASIC program or hand-code your own HTML website. there was a desire to understand :: HOW IT WORKS? HOW DID IT DO THAT?
just because our old-brains did it "the hard way" and now we have these LLMs that can just make it happen, doesn't mean that our little ones want to/should skip the steps of understanding HOW IT WORKS
me and my kids have been making all sort of silly games and my oldest is starting to wonder HOW DOES THAT WORK, PAPA??? and i'm like, well, let me show you this...
a magical thing! what a time to be alive!!! there is joy, but you have to conjure it!!
The real question is who was still buying this type of book in the last decade or two? What value were they getting out of it? Was it being used as reference or training or what?
If you haven‘t been paying attention you will off course miss the good stuff out there.
Rachel Andrew’s (mentioned in TFA) for example has The New CSS Layout (2017) https://abookapart.com/products/the-new-css-layout.html an excellent book I still recommend for anybody who want to learn about modern CSS layout.
But if you are this dismissive of the field of course you will fail to see the value of them.
A Book Apart shut down and says all copies have been sold. They suggest reaching out to Rachel Andrew directly to see if the book is available elsewhere. (Her website just links back to A Book Apart).
Around 10 years ago I used to worry a little about keeping up with younger folks. I only really started using computers when I was 9-10, and didn't get the internet at home until my mid-teens. I thought there's probably kids learning JS at age 6 these days... These kids are going to be almost super-human in their technical skills compared to someone like myself who didn't learn HTML until their early teens.
But then around 2020 I realised kids actually have no clue how to use computers because their primary computer is a phone or a tablet. And there only experience with desktop computers are Chromebooks at school.
Now I suspect my generation will be the most knowledgable technical generation by far. The only issue for us is that no one will care.
As someone who used to write a lot of tech tutorials and has published a technical book, for me it's much less a financial thing and much more just sadness that something I spent a lot of my life doing, that used to generate emails every week from people saying thank you for helping them is now just completely worthless. I've spoken about this before here, but I feel like I've lost a large part of myself over the last couple of years because almost everything I used to do in my spare time now seems completely pointless.
It's over guys. Web Development (1994-2025) will be remembered like elevator operators. What it transforms into at this point is still an open question being actively discovered. But our vocation is dead and gone as it was.
I'm surprised it's continued for so long! I've been doing web dev for 30 years and never felt the need to read a text or even watch a video, for me it's just all available in text on the web and always has been because the people building the web are using the web to do it.
I bought some books to support A list Apart, but most of the content seemed to be an aggregation of stuff that authors were already writing about before/after.
What does education look like 2027 and onwards? My son is graduating soon and will major in Computer Science, with a secondary Art degree.
I have no idea how it will feel to be forced to write code and learn data structures, and SQL, and infrastructure, when it's all right there in 15 seconds with the AI agent.
Does anyone have any experience with this in 2026 specifically? How are the kids doing?
At least with a medical degree you HAVE to study, and memorize. It's part of the job.
> I have no idea how it will feel to be forced to write code and learn data structures, and SQL, and infrastructure, when it's all right there in 15 seconds with the AI agent.
> Does anyone have any experience with this in 2026 specifically? How are the kids doing?
Here's what it looks like from the perspective of Europe's largest tech company as of 2 months ago [0].
I think nobody knows for sure what software development is going to look like in 2027 and onwards.
I am convinced that there is no fundamental difference between artificial neural networks and biological ones. Eventually, anything a human can do, a computer will do better.
Tech companies have poured trillions into trying to make AI program better and it's still worse than any competent human. That does not give much confidence that computers will be able to do everything better than humans can.
I wouldn't go quite that far ("death" of web dev ed). there's still a very large gap in certain areas. Two off the top of my head are systems thinking or org psychology; areas that developers could pivot towards as things get more clanker-driven.
I've reluctantly dipped my toes into using AI for development. I make sure I understand the codebase, and I review every line of code that was changed. Honestly, I don't see what would motivate anyone to learn TypeScript, or React anymore. This is not me glazing AI (excuse me, SI) either. Software will only be vibe coded slop after the people who already know how to read code have moved on, and the industry will deserve it.
> Most of my peers who had been selling courses and training were shutting down their businesses
“Nobody’s buying your course bro” has been a meme for years
things people didn’t want are disappearing, the people that would actually take initiative in education have another solution. those error-prone chatbots that the article mentions are good enough. most people aren’t trying to get jobs in the profession, they are trying to make minimum viable web products and landing pages that fit on free tiers, and succeeding
I saw a couple of interesting new tech books from Manning and Packt and they were AI slop that just appeared out of the blue. So I held off buying them.
There is no guarantee that the authors invested the time in creating the tutorial,book or the course so why would I waste money on that?
LLMs made it easy to skip the BS. Once you know programmingh you don't need hours and hours of content. Just the mental model for and you're good to go.
If it weren't for the job losses I'd never want to go back to 2015 or so to go back and forth on SO questions and answers and spend days on a boilerplate issue.
After speaking with programming interns, it's most likely because software development as a career is dead now with the advent of AI. Not because people are using AI to learn.
But unlike the author of this post (or cited authors) I'm not sore. AI is providing a much better education model for students. So it's us that we have to adapt, not complain that the world is changing.
For example, in Machine Learning our projects are sometimes extremely long and repetitive. Because before AI, it was a valuable skill to be able to recall APIs quickly (what is the method to drop duplicates in a dataframe again?).
But today that's no longer the truth, and for the better. I am happy students don't have to go over the same repetitive low-value processes that I had to go to. Students can now focus on more high level valuable tasks: understand the domain, compare evaluation methods, compare models, balance tradeoffs, present solutions/reports, etc.
It's like in the 50s when students had to memorize tables of logarithms. Nobody misses that.
We are in the process of recreating all our projects to adapt to the new world. We'll see how it goes.
Maybe when it comes to any coding-related learning, I can agree with that point.
However I think the future of education in general is very bleak. When we have plummeting scores for the PISA exam across the world [1], I fear people will get dumber and dumber.
There will always be those who thrive, but the easier it is to obtain information/knowledge, the less I think people have an incentive to do it. And I don't buy that AI will solve all intellectual jobs anyway.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/pisa-2026-results-reading-math-scores/...
This is exactly what AI companies need, so that's development should be celebrated. There are two paths to capture the value that's currently wasted on paying people:
1. Build a system that's superior to nearly all people.
2. Make people worse, so even an inferior system is superior to them.
Getting AI into the classrooms and degrading the educational system are important for path #2.
It's good not to put all your eggs in one basket, so I'm glad the AI industry is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy against their competitors. Who cares about the waste and destruction for humanity, as long the investors get good returns?
We end up with shit results and where they arent shit students are rushed though as if to prevent them from thinking about the materials.
We have libraries full of unused education formulas. Some 2000 years old. Then there is nutrition, sleep and other work/rest ratios, physical health.
How expect results without learning to teach and learning to learn?
Onto what should one anchor learnings if the suroundings are always the same?
I never hear a word about spaced repetition in school. Its so basic i must conclude they knew nothing about what should have been their area of expertise.
When things get bad enough we will [finally] have reason to improve.
Maybe the great work of Salman Khan is merely a hint?
LLms dont help here either.
Part of learning is about struggle. Seems many here want to disregard that fact and just run to the LLM lmao. Yeah you can do that - the knowledge won't really stick.
It's a real shame a leader of an education company doesn't value the actual learning process. Those "low value" processes are the building blocks to understand and master high level concepts. I'm not spending my day to day thinking about the low level memory allocation in my job, but that knowledge and work helps immensely in how I approach the higher level assignments and wider architecture. And I still kick myself because my assembly knowledge is is only 1.5 semester's worth.
And yes, I still look up how to construct an array in C++. Not really because my memory is bad (okay, kind of), but more for the practice of reviewing API's and parameters and maybe making new revelations. I probably knew internally some 12 years ago I could set an initial capacity in one of the array's constructors. I didn't really "understand" the value in that until one random work day 4 years later as I was working through some in-house container packages.
You can even say that doesn't matter if you know what resize() is, but it's those little bits of learning nuggets that builds you up from a "fine engineer" to a "great engineer". Less the knowledge and more the work ethics built to obtain it.
Superior to any teacher I've ever had, no matter how involved they are. I genuinely don't even see what my teacher is needed for beyond a requirement for me to be there. I can ask the bot "can you clarify X section" at 3am and it'll do in 1 second. In class, the teacher reads the slides, adds some extra points and takes questions. But my bot does all this, completely personalized to me.
Times move on, and I don't see teachers surviving. I'm hoping by next year the college will offer an "at home, self paced course" option. Theres no reason for me to be there.
Have you independently verified your learning?
AI is moving fast, so I'm very open to the suggestion that Claude can do today what it couldn't six months ago. But my experience with folks who are learning from AI, historically, has been that they have high confidence in abilities they are not able to demonstrate when asked to show mastery through conventional problem solving.
I think that is possible with AI (I haven't experienced it), but I also feel like most folks use basic/naive/cursory techniques when using AI because they don't know what they don't know.
Part of it is shear volume of "stuff" that I'm doing on the fly while leaning on AI as a crutch for speed (otherwise why wouldn't I just do it myself), the other part is that it's ephemeral, even if you read all the lines of code, it's hard to beat manually typing them yourself for retention _and_ failing at it, and being forced to teach myself what I did wrong.
All that's to say, I think AI psychosis can happen at a group level.
I do, all the time. I get test, do good and then the college signs off that Im a certified mechanic when Im done.
Maybe its more of a critique on the school, but no one tests you on your ability to disassemble an engine and rebuild it. They simply make you write a test based off terms you learned in a textbook.
This was exactly my experience in high school, university, and now the same in college.
I would of killed for this bot during my math courses in university.
Then, for better or worse, I was pushed to honors and AP classes in high school. The same methods didn't work there. Things got more abstract and I needed to connect multiple concepts together. Math drills turned into word problems that revealed weaknesses in my older math fundamentals. reciting facts from a required reading wasn't enough; I needed to know what that meant and understand the setting of the book.
My grades suffered and you can argue the "academically optimal" way would have been to not take so many advanced classes. But those experiences definitely helped me to critically think better. Eventually (My English and History appreciation would come much later. Math and Science trained me well).
It is also a shame how much the quality of the teacher can affect this experience and perception of education as a whole. I wonder if those enthusiastic to replace the teacher ever had one that fit their needs?
Teachers and schools need to let LLMs do the things they are better at, and concentrate on having instructors do the things that LLMs cannot. Teachers that only read from the slides have always been a problem.
Your instructor should be having you dismantle an injector pump or bleed an air locked injector rail. You can read a book about how to do that, but you won’t really know how to do it until you’ve done it for reall
LLMs are not the solution to providing the best teacher at scale that people think it is.
You clearly have enough humility in your field to be able to soak up knowledge. That's great for you! I suggest your dedication is rare and teachers continue to be essential for society.
Teaching should turn into conveyance of taste. The teacher should help figure out what needs to be examined and how to examine; help figure out ways to close the gap between the textbook and reality. AI can't do those things well yet, and perhaps it never will be able to.
Sucks, but its true. In my case, if there was a test that required me to disassemble an engine top to bottom, claude would be mostly useless.
Maybe all education will get more and more similar to e.g. learning an instrument.
You can get everything from YouTube videos, sure. But a good teacher will help with things like knowing how to get a good repertoire for your skill set, what bad habits not to develop that will cripple your ability to learn more complex pieces over time, etc.
I think expertise in hard subjects will only become more and more valuable (as always), and thus harder and harder (and more expensive) to achieve.
We are kind of envisioning that university will be a place for social activities, mingling, rich people meeting partners, etc. So we are moving towards more of that.
I have a feeling AI is hitting all the same dopamine receptors as your attention grabbing apps and video games, is highly addictive, and is merely making you feel like you are achieving something. Sort of like DuoLingo.
If I was using this AI and my grades were poor then I'd agree, that its perceieved but its provably working.
That’s a shame. I’m surprised someone so well versed in web technologies has such a brittle setup. Cloudflare Pages, or if you you’d prefer to stay CDN-less, a $4 VPS, will handle any sort of traffic this blog can reasonably receive.
That's at least what I do. Sometimes it feels performative at best, other time I get genuinely new ideas by having a vague thought turn into a tweak able viz.
When you hear the phrase "but first we have to go back to..." on YouTube, you're entering a filler section to allow more ad content.
https://2ality.com/
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/
I for one mourn the loss of these and other blogs and am not exactly sure the trade was worth it. Not with the cretins in charge.
I don't think what's happening is a uniquely AI phenomenon. If it wasn't AI, it was going to be something else. The ground is always shifting beneath you. It's happened to me in multiple fields through my career. You adapt or you pivot. Like a startup.
For many people who feel negatively affected by AI, my advice to them is to do what I did when my professional disciplines changed to something I didn't recognize: pivot. The great news is that AI makes it really easy to be a beginner in a new adjacent field.
LLMs with HTMX and plain old CSS and JavaScript (maybe Typescript) is the future. Getting back to little to no build times and frontends that don't take up 1+ GB of RAM on the clients
[1] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/anchor-positioning/
I think traditional web frontends might be dead for any applications with servers that can afford to keep server-side state of a logged-in user.
(Notably this includes almost any kind of AI application, because the LLM costs dwarf the web hosting costs anyway.)
And for the stateless ones, there's always htmx
1. LLM webpages in my experience have definitely not gotten simpler, nor load faster. It just pushes out more of the same junk underneath without any of the oversight we'd give a human
2. I'm not even sure the webpages are the big resource hog anymore. Chromium itself has had the reputation for eating RAM for well over a decade at this point.
3. In many ways, we did this to ourselves. In the name of shipping faster, we (or perhaps the executives) outsourced solutions that would sacrifice the simplicity of the code for "more mainainable, cross platform" frameworks. Electron was a solution for software companies not wanting a dedicated Windows and Mac (and perhaps Linux) team. React was a very specific solution for one of the largest websites in the world, that the rest of the industry adopted as a trend.
You want it structured? You need the book - "AI" won't solve it for you (well, if we discount cases of word for word reproduction... which we probably shouldn't, but this does not seem to be the argument here).
The kind of people, that read the books, are the kind of people that largely won't settle for a chatbot as a replacement.
Can there be another reason for the sales drop? Unemployment, "death of the junior", wages decline?
Personally, I read way less traditional books when it comes to learning stuff. Especially the “utility”/“tutorial”/“handbook”. Top nitch books talking about general principles I’d still read.
Especially for books that need to teach me a subset of a certain discipline - in the past I’d get 4-5 (or at least samples), and try to find the parts that are of interest to me in a style that fits me. Novadays I’d just ask Claude to explain things in a form that I like, with pretty illustrations from Imgen :)
E.g. I don’t think I’ll read the animal books from O’reilly again. But an equivalend of “Thinking in C++” or “Pearls of programming” of a new field? Sure.
There are a vast number of books that I purchased not for any interest in the topic, but to solve a particular problem. I have zero interest in understanding Docker. I find it tedious. But I do have a book on it as I did need to know it at some point.
I wouldn’t buy that book today, as AI means I no longer need to know Docker.
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.
I know correlation is not causation, post hoc ergo propter hoc etc. etc. But these circumstantial evidence are too strong to simply ignore... As it stands AI is the obvious culprit. And with the current evidence, it is perfectly reasonable to blame AI and nothing but AI.
I use AI both in the cloud (I tend to avoid Anthropic...) and with local models.
I've probably written more code in the past year than in my whole career. I can now create what I desire (I just created a telemark skiing game over the weekend based on my Strava segments). I think this has helped my teaching as well. In a recent ML course, I created many interactive examples that in the past were just doodles on my whiteboard, but are now embedded in the notebooks I give students.
I've also taught a few AI courses to clients as well. However, with the inevitable rust/ASM-ification of everything, I'm not sure how long those skills will be valid. I do, however, think that having a human in the loop for ML and data analysis is still important.
How will skill building happen when LLMs and coding harnesses seemingly provide all the answers at one's fingertips?
Having the taste and business sense to develop the right thing will be important. If it stops working, ask the AI to fix it.
People have been asking this for a couple of years already. I have yet to hear a real answer beyond "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."
Web development, as much as some would like to think, is and has always been, complex.
I haven't tried learning Rust yet, and I'm sure as hell not going to lean on an LLM at all when I do.
This time my approach was better and so was the capability of the model. I can make a small change in one place and have the model propagate the change throughout the codebase. I'm still working directly with the code, and the agent doesn't have to make any important decisions about structure (which remain generally terrible). My familiarity with the codebase is the same as if I had made each edit myself.
It is definitely possible to build faster and better with an LLM and not give up control or the enjoyable part of coding. The energy in this space still seems to revolve around guiding the agent or letting it take over, the key is ignoring it entirely and discovering what works for you.
If I had a question about a new library now, I wouldn't google for a tutorial, I'd just ask ChatGPT.
I suspect a lot of people who formerly might have been interested in a web dev tutorial now just an LLM to make them a website.
I'm still doing hybrid coding, half LLM half manually. But every new LLM does more and more of the job...
just because our old-brains did it "the hard way" and now we have these LLMs that can just make it happen, doesn't mean that our little ones want to/should skip the steps of understanding HOW IT WORKS
me and my kids have been making all sort of silly games and my oldest is starting to wonder HOW DOES THAT WORK, PAPA??? and i'm like, well, let me show you this...
a magical thing! what a time to be alive!!! there is joy, but you have to conjure it!!
Rachel Andrew’s (mentioned in TFA) for example has The New CSS Layout (2017) https://abookapart.com/products/the-new-css-layout.html an excellent book I still recommend for anybody who want to learn about modern CSS layout.
But if you are this dismissive of the field of course you will fail to see the value of them.
I’ve never understood that but for some reason it is a thing
But then around 2020 I realised kids actually have no clue how to use computers because their primary computer is a phone or a tablet. And there only experience with desktop computers are Chromebooks at school.
Now I suspect my generation will be the most knowledgable technical generation by far. The only issue for us is that no one will care.
As someone who used to write a lot of tech tutorials and has published a technical book, for me it's much less a financial thing and much more just sadness that something I spent a lot of my life doing, that used to generate emails every week from people saying thank you for helping them is now just completely worthless. I've spoken about this before here, but I feel like I've lost a large part of myself over the last couple of years because almost everything I used to do in my spare time now seems completely pointless.
I bought some books to support A list Apart, but most of the content seemed to be an aggregation of stuff that authors were already writing about before/after.
I have no idea how it will feel to be forced to write code and learn data structures, and SQL, and infrastructure, when it's all right there in 15 seconds with the AI agent.
Does anyone have any experience with this in 2026 specifically? How are the kids doing?
At least with a medical degree you HAVE to study, and memorize. It's part of the job.
> Does anyone have any experience with this in 2026 specifically? How are the kids doing?
Here's what it looks like from the perspective of Europe's largest tech company as of 2 months ago [0].
0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229412
SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost (404media.co)
102 points | 53 days ago | 68 comments
I am convinced that there is no fundamental difference between artificial neural networks and biological ones. Eventually, anything a human can do, a computer will do better.
It is already here. That is the current reality.
“Nobody’s buying your course bro” has been a meme for years
things people didn’t want are disappearing, the people that would actually take initiative in education have another solution. those error-prone chatbots that the article mentions are good enough. most people aren’t trying to get jobs in the profession, they are trying to make minimum viable web products and landing pages that fit on free tiers, and succeeding
If it weren't for the job losses I'd never want to go back to 2015 or so to go back and forth on SO questions and answers and spend days on a boilerplate issue.
By BS, i mean tsconfig files and caddy boilerplate.