The death of web development education

(molily.de)

63 points | by ibobev an hour ago ago

46 comments

  • santiagobasulto 16 minutes ago ago

    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.

    • danjovich 4 minutes ago ago

      > 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.

      [1] https://www.dw.com/en/pisa-2026-results-reading-math-scores/...

    • neya 6 minutes ago ago

      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.

  • __mharrison__ 2 minutes ago ago

    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.

  • Ralo 20 minutes ago ago

    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.

    • JumpCrisscross 9 minutes ago ago

      > Superior to any teacher I've ever had

      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.

    • camillomiller 16 minutes ago ago

      This comment is disgustingly depressing

      • augment_me a minute ago ago

        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.

      • acenturyandabit 11 minutes ago ago

        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.

      • HeyLaughingBoy 7 minutes ago ago

        Not for the person who's making it and accruing the benefit!

        • runarberg 3 minutes ago ago

          The perceived (i.e. self reported) benefit.

          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.

  • wagslane 11 minutes ago ago

    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.

    • DaveChurchill 6 minutes ago ago

      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.

  • reassess_blind 43 minutes ago ago

    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.

    • xgulfie 32 minutes ago ago

      expensive and brittle are orthogonal

  • Insimwytim 31 minutes ago ago

    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 - the "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", lower wages?

    • kolinko 20 minutes ago ago

      Slightly disagee.

      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.

    • MattGaiser 27 minutes ago ago

      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.

    • runarberg 23 minutes ago ago

      > 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.

  • doginasuit 12 minutes ago ago

    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.

  • drewbitt an hour ago ago

    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.

    • gherkinnn 16 minutes ago ago

      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.

      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.

    • sodapopcan 30 minutes ago ago

      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)_/¯

  • brailsafe 19 minutes ago ago

    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.

  • ORDINAND_PIZZA 23 minutes ago ago

    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!!

  • Legend2440 an hour ago ago

    I can get why they're mad about it, but the reality is that chatbots are better/easier to learn from than courses and tutorials.

    If I had a question about a new library now, I wouldn't google for a tutorial, I'd just ask ChatGPT.

    • V__ an hour ago ago

      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.

      • tp3358 41 minutes ago ago

        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.

        • gherkinnn 14 minutes ago ago

          And yet I gave to spend considerable time getting Astra not to use useEffect for no good reason.

      • charcircuit 27 minutes ago ago

        You can ask the AI what you don't know.

    • gherkinnn 15 minutes ago ago

      Learn from bots or get bots to do things?

      • Legend2440 9 minutes ago ago

        Honestly both.

        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...

  • singpolyma3 an hour ago ago

    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?

    • runarberg 43 minutes ago ago

      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.

      • fluidcruft 25 minutes ago ago

        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).

      • ifwinterco 25 minutes ago ago

        A lot of people take pride in not being able to understand CSS despite it not being that complicated.

        I’ve never understood that but for some reason it is a thing

  • vinyl7 25 minutes ago ago

    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.

  • micromacrofoot 26 minutes ago ago

    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.

  • sergiotapia 33 minutes ago ago

    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.

    • x______________ 14 minutes ago ago

      > 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].

      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

    • Legend2440 28 minutes ago ago

      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.

      • bigstrat2003 10 minutes ago ago

        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.

  • popalchemist 19 minutes ago ago

    The author posits a situation where big-tech AI firms teaming up with fascists as a hypothetical.

    It is already here. That is the current reality.

  • yieldcrv 12 minutes ago ago

    > 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 succeeding

  • myth_drannon 28 minutes ago ago

    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?

  • coolThingsFirst 30 minutes ago ago

    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.