Losing Web Development Educational Courses

I recently read this post by Mathias Schäfer and it made me sad, but also made me think about where I've been in my career and how I got to where I am now.

I graduated from college almost 20 years ago with a degree in computer science. I got a fantastic education and learned the fundamentals. But so much of what I do in my day-to-day work now I've either learned on the job, or through various books and online courses, both free and paid.

The books and courses were instrumental for helping me learn new libraries, new ways of doing things, or just to increase my knowledge and understanding of tooling and languages I already use. There are people who do fantastic work writing books, tutorials, and courses to help others at all levels learn new things. The authors behind the books, tutorials, and courses have put in a lot of work to make them as in-depth, accurate, and easy to understand. That takes work, and it takes a lot of knowledge and skill. Building applications and websites often feels a lot easier than being able to teach someone how to build an application or website.

But now, enter Claude, GitHub Copilot and other LLMs. Now people can get code generators to write the code for them. Why take the courses? Why learn the fundamentals. Just enter a few prompts into some LLM and boom, now you have a website. It wrote the CSS, JavaScript, and everything else for you.

Andy Bell, the Founder of Set.Studio and Piccalilli wrote about the loss of course revenue he saw since 2025. Josh Comeau wrote about taking a sabbatical from writing his fantastic courses. Whatever world we're going into, I don't like it.

LLMs and AI might be able to generate the code to spin up a website. It might even look good, but the humans behind them entering the prompts need to be able to understand the code the LLMs generate. Some of it might be good. I've found the output to be impressive from time to time while using it at work. I've also found the output to be utter horseshit sometimes. I have the experience to know the difference. Does a brand new developer leaning on Claude Code or other AI tools know the difference? If they haven't learned the difference yet...they're gonna learn fast.

That's where so much of the human side has to come in. The makers of the courses, the authors of the books have that knowledge. Their books and courses have the hard work put into them from the experiences they have of solving the problems throughout their careers. Their courses and books help those who read and take the courses by sharing the whys, the gotchas that LLMs aren't always able to explain. The courses and books share the hard-earned knowledge about how to do what they're explaining the right way.

The fear now, and the beginnings of what we're seeing, would see those authors leave the business of creating new courses, new books, and new tutorials with them no longer able to earn a living by doing so. As painful and unfortunate as it might be to look at things from the view of the almighty dollar, at the end of the day we live in a capitalistic society, and capitalism doesn't care whether you live or die. People have got to eat and afford life's necessities. I can't fault them for taking a sabbatical or rethinking how they spend their time and effort.

I've been developing for the web for 20 years now, and if there's one constant, it's that things are always changing. CSS and JavaScript are always adding new methods and properties. There's always some new way to do something that people have been clamoring for for ages. There's always ways to improve how to build websites and web applications. I've found that courses, books, and tutorials have been incredibly helpful to gain an understanding of how to use the new tools and functionality.

My fear is that soon they will be gone, and we'll only find out what we've lost after it's too late.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go work on the Web Components course from Scott Jehl I bought a while back and have been meaning to work through.