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!!
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?
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’d read Strosup’s “Thinking in C++”
novadays. But “Pearls of programming”? Sure.
It depends on whether you bought books to learn or bought books to solve.
There are a vast number of books that I purchased not for any interest in the topic, but to solve a particular problem. I have zero interest in understanding Docker. I find it tedious. But I do have a book on it as I did need to know it at some point.
I wouldn’t buy that book today, as AI means I no longer need to know Docker.
> The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.
I know correlation is not causation, post hoc ergo propter hoc etc. etc. But these circumstantial evidence are too strong to simply ignore... As it stands AI is the obvious culprit. And with the current evidence, it is perfectly reasonable to blame AI and nothing but AI.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised it's continued for so long! I've been doing web dev for 30 years and never felt the need to read a text or even watch a video, for me it's just all available in text on the web and always has been because the people building the web are using the web to do it.
I bought some books to support A list Apart, but most of the content seemed to be an aggregation of stuff that authors were already writing about before/after.
What does education look like 2027 and onwards? My son is graduating soon and will major in Computer Science, with a secondary Art degree.
I have no idea how it will feel to be forced to write code and learn data structures, and SQL, and infrastructure, when it's all right there in 15 seconds with the AI agent.
Does anyone have any experience with this in 2026 specifically? How are the kids doing?
At least with a medical degree you HAVE to study, and memorize. It's part of the job.
I 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.
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.
24 comments:
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!!
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?
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’d read Strosup’s “Thinking in C++” novadays. But “Pearls of programming”? Sure.
It depends on whether you bought books to learn or bought books to solve.
There are a vast number of books that I purchased not for any interest in the topic, but to solve a particular problem. I have zero interest in understanding Docker. I find it tedious. But I do have a book on it as I did need to know it at some point.
I wouldn’t buy that book today, as AI means I no longer need to know Docker.
> The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.
I know correlation is not causation, post hoc ergo propter hoc etc. etc. But these circumstantial evidence are too strong to simply ignore... As it stands AI is the obvious culprit. And with the current evidence, it is perfectly reasonable to blame AI and nothing but AI.
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 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.
expensive and brittle are orthogonal
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
You can ask the AI what you don't know.
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.
I'm surprised it's continued for so long! I've been doing web dev for 30 years and never felt the need to read a text or even watch a video, for me it's just all available in text on the web and always has been because the people building the web are using the web to do it.
I bought some books to support A list Apart, but most of the content seemed to be an aggregation of stuff that authors were already writing about before/after.
What does education look like 2027 and onwards? My son is graduating soon and will major in Computer Science, with a secondary Art degree.
I have no idea how it will feel to be forced to write code and learn data structures, and SQL, and infrastructure, when it's all right there in 15 seconds with the AI agent.
Does anyone have any experience with this in 2026 specifically? How are the kids doing?
At least with a medical degree you HAVE to study, and memorize. It's part of the job.
I 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.
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.
out of tutorial hell into another hell...