The death of web development education

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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 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 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.