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).
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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.
That's a good point, but if you have an always-on agent focused solely on helping you improve your knowledge/skills, it can ask you questions every day and gradually identify gaps in your knowledge and it gets really good on knowing where to push you to.
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.
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].
As someone without CS background working in a modest app, I think a lot of it will come down to architecture, supervision and direction rather than grunt code writing.
You need to know about database normalization, about algorithms and techniques, ideate solution to problems etc because as impressive as those 1-shot youtube videos on model release look, once you go beyond that, that's where the value ad comes in my experience.
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?
Economic headwinds and the collapse of tech labor would definitely impact people's willingness to learn tech, especially on their own time with books/courses. I'm not sure if it's enough alone to cause yearly 50+% declines, though.
AI for sure impacts ad revenue. It's an absolute mess trying to measure proper web traffic anymore, and it' been shown quite a few times how AI summaries in search impact page clicks.
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.
Eh, combing the internet for ideas, perusing revision history, and finally discovering the cause of a problem was kind of fun. It was a challenge. It was slow, and I understand why business was frustrated by that, but on a personal level I enjoyed it. It had the same rewards as any other game or puzzle.
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?
Packt? Avoid, avoid, avoid. This is true. Their stuff tends to be slop grenades thrown over the wall. And as you correctly point out, this was the case before generative AI.
My experience with Manning, OTOH, tends to be good. Most of the material I've seen from them was human-written.
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.
curation is very expensive (in time) and nearly impossible to do without already being a SME who knows what's good/bad content. I have spend weeks trying to piece together curriculum for a "free" learning path on some topic I desire to learn. It's exhausting.
In that case, why not just find a good Udemy course after maybe a few hours of research and throw $11 at it when it's "on sale" (I hate the psychology there, but that's a whole other bag of worms) when I just got back from paying $12 at Starbucks?
Of course, I'm not a web dev and don't need full books whenever that tech inevitably comes my way. I love books for my own domain, and several of them are well worth their weight in gold, since all the amazing tech out there isn't just freely available to view with an inspector.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
How I learn doesn't really change much anyways. If wasn't for claude, it would still be me asking the teacher to clarify, or expand upon a topic after class, or over email. The entire course is graded off tests. Zero practical.
All of my university was the same way. I would of killed for access to this bot during my math courses then.
> 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
Out of curiosity, where–geographically–are you going to school?
If you're able to pass you theoretical tests without AI, it's fair to say you're learning what's being tested.
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?
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.
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
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.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but Western societies are already plagued by loneliness and isolation. That will only get worse if everyone just stays at home to learn. The point of schools -- I mean, less for adult education, but still -- has always been not just the concrete knowledge being taught, but also social skills, patience, humility, learning how to learn, and interaction with other humans.
If we want an education system optimised for producing capable agent jockeys, then by all means this seems an efficient way to do so. But sometimes I wonder if, for all the modern wonders capitalism and individualism have brought us, we haven't lost track of being humans - all sharing a temporary seat on a fragile spaceship, hurtling through darkness and uncertainty.
Just keeping our heads to the AI grindstone until we die doesn't really seem to be a good answer to what to do with our existence.
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.
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.
> before AI, it was a valuable skill to be able to recall APIs quickly
That’a the low value they’re talking about. And all of that stuff is accidental complexity.
To use their example, you need to know that dropping duplicates is a good idea (and why). Knowing what the syntax and api calls to do that is, in my opinion, unnecessary.
That's not accidental, anymore than human language itself is accidental. APIs are designed very intentionally, and a good API's parameters have architectural reasons behind what they include (or exclude).
Even your example has unintentional complexity. A 'duplicate'? What's that? Do we compare the memory it points to? Through use of a custom comparator function?by an id or tag? APIs and entire languages are designed around how we define such seemingly simple terms.
Ultimately a language, be it a programming language or human one, is about communication. I find there to be value in knowing how to communicate effectively, even if employers increasingly disregard the value of such knowledge. Without it, we'll quickly find out why it's fundamentall quickly.
“Computer add a filter that removes all duplicate entries from this data structure. Two entries are duplicates if they every value in their rows are identical.”
This is the same thing as pressing the power button on my computer; I want the thing turned on, I don’t want to have to know about memory training.
>I don’t want to have to know about memory training.
And then we wonder why apps are getting so much slower and bloated. That's fine if you don't want to think that low level, but someone needs to worry about performance. And others will need different needs for defining a duplicate in their different use cases.
I don’t think that lack of knowledge about memory training is a hill to die on when it comes to causes of app bloat.
The people who need to most think about performance are those making the frameworks and languages. Why are bloated electron apps so easy to make but building native cross-platform apps with similar ergonomics hard? Why are people choosing electron?
>The people who need to most think about performance are those making the frameworks and languages.
Yes. I am not a web dev, but I tend to fall into that category in my domain.
>Why are bloated electron apps so easy to make but building native cross-platform apps with similar ergonomics hard?
If you want to be blunt, it's political. Each OS wants to ultimately build its own moat, so there's less incentive to come together and make a standardized solution. Then Linux is a less centralized OS that makes theoretical cross platform support even harder. Cross platform applications get made despite that friction to fill the obvious demand.
The why's of which cross platform framework wins is hard to say. It only becomes obvious that whoever breaks out tends to win more, and it gets a massive flood of support, funding, and clients. So it snowballs up. Those who don't simply struggle to stay relevant.
Electron likely wins in the market aspect that bloat isn't enough friction to turn off a modern consumer with a modernish (10 years or younger) desktop. And it especially doesn't matter to phones (which tend to skew newer).
Then based on your own analysis, at least the electron bloat angle (that many people, at least many developers, hate and wish was native) has nothing to do with the low level knowledge of the developer. And I would argue that a good deal of other areas of slow software will have the same conclusion, i.e. the slowness is not due to lack of knowledge.
We've had encyclopedias, textbooks, and the Internet for decades. Being able to recall things quickly is still very valuable in most white collar jobs because the person with the quick recall is a lot faster than the person who has to look up the information every time.
> 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.
You honestly believe that students that don't have the tenacity to stick with learning a simple set of verbs and grammar are going to have the tenacity to learn concepts steeped in jargon?
I do mean learn, which AI use has been repeatedly shown to be detrimental to.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Out of interest, how do you know that Anthropic has ingested your books? Is there a way to prove it? And how do you calculate the compensation figure? Finally, why just Anthropic? Did OpenAI not do the same?
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
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.)
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?
>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.
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.
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 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.
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[ 10.1 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadRachel 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
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.
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.
I'm experimenting with exactly that: https://miletus.app
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.
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
You need to know about database normalization, about algorithms and techniques, ideate solution to problems etc because as impressive as those 1-shot youtube videos on model release look, once you go beyond that, that's where the value ad comes in my experience.
I'm talking about learning/training for the job!
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?
AI for sure impacts ad revenue. It's an absolute mess trying to measure proper web traffic anymore, and it' been shown quite a few times how AI summaries in search impact page clicks.
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.
My experience with Manning, OTOH, tends to be good. Most of the material I've seen from them was human-written.
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.
In that case, why not just find a good Udemy course after maybe a few hours of research and throw $11 at it when it's "on sale" (I hate the psychology there, but that's a whole other bag of worms) when I just got back from paying $12 at Starbucks?
Of course, I'm not a web dev and don't need full books whenever that tech inevitably comes my way. I love books for my own domain, and several of them are well worth their weight in gold, since all the amazing tech out there isn't just freely available to view with an inspector.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
All of my university was the same way. I would of killed for access to this bot during my math courses then.
Out of curiosity, where–geographically–are you going to school?
If you're able to pass you theoretical tests without AI, it's fair to say you're learning what's being tested.
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?
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.
I never saw a teacher that managed to do that. Not to any of my classmates, nor to me.
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
If we want an education system optimised for producing capable agent jockeys, then by all means this seems an efficient way to do so. But sometimes I wonder if, for all the modern wonders capitalism and individualism have brought us, we haven't lost track of being humans - all sharing a temporary seat on a fragile spaceship, hurtling through darkness and uncertainty.
Just keeping our heads to the AI grindstone until we die doesn't really seem to be a good answer to what to do with our existence.
It's the great turn inward of humanity.
It is already here. That is the current reality.
"I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers"
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.
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.
That’a the low value they’re talking about. And all of that stuff is accidental complexity.
To use their example, you need to know that dropping duplicates is a good idea (and why). Knowing what the syntax and api calls to do that is, in my opinion, unnecessary.
Even your example has unintentional complexity. A 'duplicate'? What's that? Do we compare the memory it points to? Through use of a custom comparator function?by an id or tag? APIs and entire languages are designed around how we define such seemingly simple terms.
Ultimately a language, be it a programming language or human one, is about communication. I find there to be value in knowing how to communicate effectively, even if employers increasingly disregard the value of such knowledge. Without it, we'll quickly find out why it's fundamentall quickly.
This is the same thing as pressing the power button on my computer; I want the thing turned on, I don’t want to have to know about memory training.
And then we wonder why apps are getting so much slower and bloated. That's fine if you don't want to think that low level, but someone needs to worry about performance. And others will need different needs for defining a duplicate in their different use cases.
The people who need to most think about performance are those making the frameworks and languages. Why are bloated electron apps so easy to make but building native cross-platform apps with similar ergonomics hard? Why are people choosing electron?
Yes. I am not a web dev, but I tend to fall into that category in my domain.
>Why are bloated electron apps so easy to make but building native cross-platform apps with similar ergonomics hard?
If you want to be blunt, it's political. Each OS wants to ultimately build its own moat, so there's less incentive to come together and make a standardized solution. Then Linux is a less centralized OS that makes theoretical cross platform support even harder. Cross platform applications get made despite that friction to fill the obvious demand.
The why's of which cross platform framework wins is hard to say. It only becomes obvious that whoever breaks out tends to win more, and it gets a massive flood of support, funding, and clients. So it snowballs up. Those who don't simply struggle to stay relevant.
Electron likely wins in the market aspect that bloat isn't enough friction to turn off a modern consumer with a modernish (10 years or younger) desktop. And it especially doesn't matter to phones (which tend to skew newer).
I don’t have to remember assembly intrinsic since the compiler deals with that, I just describe the higher level goal and it implements it.
> 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.
You honestly believe that students that don't have the tenacity to stick with learning a simple set of verbs and grammar are going to have the tenacity to learn concepts steeped in jargon?
I do mean learn, which AI use has been repeatedly shown to be detrimental to.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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
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] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/anchor-positioning/
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.