I am genuinely starting to fear an almost universal dumbing down of humanity as a result of AI. It feels like so many people have just stopped caring about what they do or what they create. They no longer believe they need to know what they are doing or care about the results. The machines will do the knowing and caring for them. Or they won't - but what they produce without knowing or caring will be good enough to tick whatever boxes are necessary so it doesn't matter.

Over the years I have enjoyed many deep and interesting technical discussions online - both here on HN and elsewhere. I can't help feeling that those discussions have also all but disappeared over the past few months - alongside high quality free material that some experts have kindly given away but increasingly no longer do. I rarely find myself contributing any more because there is little on any of my usual online hangouts that is interesting enough to spark a deep technical discussion any more. It's 90% AI stuff - either written about AI or (usually poorly) written by AI - and most of the discussions that do initially catch my interest at all seem to end being very negative and depressing. (I appreciate the irony that I'm perpetuating that cycle right now. Looking through my relatively sparse recent contributions to HN is actually quite depressing. Although at least I actually am getting out more!)

I wouldn't mind so much if I believed the hype about the benefits of AI-generated work and thought that overall this period would be a net win for humanity. Unfortunately I don't really believe that. I fear the LLM era will eventually be remembered for producing tools that could do average/routine tasks quickly and to an acceptable standard but that were actually used to (try to) do good/innovative tasks with substandard results. But by the time enough decision-makers realise this it might be too late and the damage might already be done and hard to reverse.

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.

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.

So I teach a couple of web architecture classes, and it’s been my experience that there is still a desire to learn how to truly build quality systems because they want to learn how to build quality systems.

I think our industry needs to transition to figure out what does it mean to build a quality system in the age of AI? It’s one thing to vibe code an application that works. But would you depend your livelihood on it? Would you get business funding and base the future of your team on it?

I think the challenge of the educational space is to figure out how to teach the judgement to build solid systems without relying on “hand coding”. For me I’ve been working on technology agnostic composable frameworks that help build that judgement. But honestly we are all just figuring this out together.

There will still be a need to be able to train system builders, the question really is what do they actually need to learn to be solid system builders in this AI era. And there’s a strong chance that pure programming language or tech stack learning may not be enough. This is what we educators need to figure out.

Nobody is mentioning the other side of this. Technology creates all of those jobs too. The field of web dev, and the ability to earn an income from as ebook was awesome. Things change and what we should doing is going in eyes wide open.

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'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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 used to listen/watch some youtube channels for learning. Especially as a newbie, I used to listen to the channel - Programming with Mosh (5M+ subscribers). I see that he has stopped producing videos regularly. Last one year, he produced only 3 videos. There could be other reasons. But I suspect lack of interest from viewers because of AI.

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?

> commodifies knowledge, instead of teaching skills and deep understanding.

I'd gently submit to the author that these are not opposites. Knowledge commodification is good, and so is deep understanding.

Good article.

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.

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?

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

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.

Education as we know it is doomed. But we have to realize that all our education systems were shaped by the means we had available to us in the past for imparting education, learning, and testing knowledge at scale, and critically the kinds of jobs we were being trained for. To put it bluntly, the entire system was tuned for producing cogs in a machine. (Or just bricks in the wall, if you will.) Because that is what the world needed.

With AI everything has been upended.

And by "everything" I mean everything: how we teach, learn, test, and most importantly, the kinds of jobs we will have in the near future.

With AI, all the "cogs in a machine" jobs are essentially gone. There is no economic reason to employ people when AI will do 80% (and rising fast!) of the work at a fraction of the cost without pesky things like perks, leaves, raises, promotions, or heck, even sleep. Humans will be needed only for the 20% (and dropping fast!) of work that AI cannot do and to keep it honest.

And unfortunately, to get to that 20% we had to go through years and years of the 80% to "pay our dues" and learn enough to get up there; the exact 80% that is usurped by AI. Not only is education hosed, so is expertise building through on-the-job experience.

But! On the flip side, we can now have a dedicated, personalized, omniscient, always-available tutor! Do we even need school or college? Like, literally a 100% of children are naturally curious and exploratory; just that formal education (shaped by understandable economic pressures) is very effective at beating it out of them. What if we free children from the restrictive rails of rote, conventional education and let them explore wherever their interests take them? They could stay home to spend more quality time with parents who outsource work to their agents.

And AI makes it very easy to just do things, and we learn best by doing, so let them do! Would that not be a good way to nurture motivated, practically skilled talent that is truly passionate about whatever discipline they choose, which will be the exact quality needed to drive them to push the boundaries where AI cannot yet reach?

We have to critically examine with brutal honesty what jobs will be needed in the future, wholly rethink from first principles how we should prepare young talent for those, and start adjusting our society and economics to safely transition to that future. I do not know what that looks like, but I know it will be tumultuous and that we must start immediately.

This is Schroedinger's Future, simultaneously terrifying and glorious.

Some people, specially on HN, routinely complain about ads on free online resources. Well, now there are no ads. The resources are gone. "[T]here’s no incentive for people to make high-quality free content." I wonder if this is what they wanted.

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.

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.

During the various covid lockdowns I started a YT channel to talk about coding and programming, not necessarily only frontend. When technologies such as ChatGPT started to show me that this kind of education was becoming unused, I stopped creating new content because I felt cheated by those AI bros. This is a comment I posted over three years ago where I was expressing my frustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543668#35548305

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.

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.

> 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

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.

Disruptive technology disrupts.

It sucks for the people caught by the change. Honestly, I’m sorry. But rapid, disruptive change has always been part of working in technology. The industry doesn’t owe any particular job category permanence.

I think the more interesting conversation is what happens to the learning industry now. If AI changes how software is built, then teaching people to become developers has to change too.

We shouldn’t be asking how to preserve the old pipeline of teaching people to write code so they can get an entry level programming job. We should be asking what it means to teach someone to become a developer when AI can increasingly write the code.

The scarce skill may shift from producing code to understanding what should be built, decomposing problems, designing systems, evaluating tradeoffs, debugging complex behavior, verifying AI generated output, and understanding whether the resulting system is actually correct, secure, maintainable, and fit for purpose.

That doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people need to learn software development. It could mean many more people can become capable developers because the mechanical barrier to producing software has fallen dramatically.

The educational model just has to catch up.

The technology changed. The answer shouldn’t be to pretend it didn’t. It should be figuring out how to use it to produce the next generation of developers.

That’s going to be contentious for some people, even a little insensitive. But it’s just how it works in our industry.