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
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/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.