I’ve long seen software development as the canary for AI. Mathias Schäfer details how the web dev education industry—books, courses, YouTube channels for building websites—has essentially been wiped out. Quoting developer/educators like Baldur Bjarnason, Salma Alam-Naylor, and Josh W. Comeau, there’s an air of defeated bleakness because people are turning to LLMs for answers and for coding itself.
Bjarnason says the “demand for web dev ebooks had cratered.” Alam-Naylor concurs, putting the blame on the training data used for LLMs:
The future feels bleak for educators. Rich curriculums we craft intentionally and carefully for real human audiences are now routinely stolen and regurgitated by predictive algorithms. The Chat Bots, with their sycophantic tone of voice, are deliberately engineered to erase our own personalities, hard work and craft entirely from the equation.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that my experience, skills, empathy and teaching expertise no longer hold the value they once did in this volatile industry (if they ever really did?).
Schäfer spends 90% of his essay laying out how the industry’s been decimated. He tries to end on a positive, or at least, supportive note saying:
I just believe in a resilient web that is not that easy to lock in a cage. To rebuild the field of web development, it requires a network of people who support each other, get a grip on web technologies, dig out best practices and establish new ones, and share their insights.
Of course, this decimation is happening in other fields as well. Demand for freelance writing has dropped 30%. Translators have seen their jobs disappear. Chegg, the education company that rents textbooks and sells study help and tutoring, laid off 45% of its staff. I’d always imagined Dario Amodei’s bloodbath warning to be about hiring. It is, but it’s also about the shifting of work from humans to AI.
In other words, I’m not buying iStockPhoto credit packs anymore because I use Midjourney. So that part of Getty Images’s business suffers, leading to lower revenue and potentially layoffs. Or I use Claude Code instead of hiring a freelance developer on Upwork. All these decisions to shift tasks to AI lead to fewer humans doing that work.
