In a personal blog post, Baldur Bjarnason describes how he worked in various fields and positions: as an author, publisher, consultant, developer, educator, as well as radio and TV producer. None of these jobs were economically viable in the long term.
Adding insult to injury, the respective communities alienate interdisciplinary people who do not fit into their narrow conception of the field. For example, either you are considered as too “technical” for a “creative” job or too “creative” for “technical” job.
Bjarnason describes the impact of generative AI on web development education:
[All] my training and education projects had dropped off one by one. Most of my peers who had been selling courses and training were shutting down their businesses. The demand for web dev ebooks had cratered. […]
Software developers haven’t all switched to using agents for their coding, but they do seem to have all switched to error-prone, backwards-facing, nondeterministic chatbots for what now passes as web dev “education”.
Many independent educators who used to earn a living from web development training and developer relations have reported that GenAI has ruined their business.
Axel Rauschmayer is one of the world’s most prolific writers on JavaScript and TypeScript. He used to publish his e-books as free online books. Since 2005, he has explained the details of ECMAScript and other web technologies in his influential blog 2ality. Now he writes:
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.
Therefore, I’m taking my blog and my books offline so that I can decide what to do next – especially w.r.t. AI companies stealing my work.
(Rauschmayer still sells his books on JavaScript and TypeScript for a reasonable price!)
Salma Alam-Naylor used to work in Developer Relations, a role under constant pressure to justify its existence. Companies expect DevRel to generate short-term financial gain – which it cannot by nature. This lead Alam-Naylor to burnout and anxiety. In this situation, she writes that AI is killing developer education:
[Developers] aren’t gathering together in online spaces to learn and teach and share exciting projects anymore, rather they are mindlessly scrolling for a much-needed hit of short-form content dopamine (because the horrors of the world are more persistent than ever). […] [Many] developers have replaced authentic human collaboration with conversations with the dreaded Chat Bots. […]
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?).
Alam-Naylor decided to accept a lower-paid developer job without public exposure. She decided to go offline.
She cites Josh W. Comeau, who creates online courses, well-researched articles and interactive tutorials on web technologies. GenAI has destroyed his business model as well:
I’ve spoken to a few course creators now, and we’re all seeing the same trend. Revenue down 50%+. Fewer people engaging with our content. People switching to LLMs, which slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation.
Comeau notes that with LLMs, there’s no incentive for people to make high-quality free content.
YouTube content creator Kyle Cook from Web Dev Simplified reported that the views on his programming tutorials and thereby his income essentially dropped by half.
I’m making half the money I was making exactly one year ago. [This] is definitely not sustainable for a full-time job. […] [There’s] almost no incentive as a creator of content to create programming content when it makes practically no money and is incredibly difficult to make when I could just make a video about the latest AI model, which is easy to make, makes more money, and gets more views. […] There’s almost no reason to make programming content anymore. The only reason I do it is because I find value in it. I find enjoyment in it. And I’m able to make money through other means rather than just YouTube ad revenue.
Rachel Andrew is a renowned technical writer and editor of many books and articles on web topics. In a series of blog posts, she reflects on the impact of GenAI on technical publishing. She reports that GenAI has broken the relationship between subject matter experts – the authors of the original draft – and editors who proof-read, fact-check and polish the article.
Editors have to apply extra scrutiny because AI tools might have introduced subtle inaccuracies without the original authors being aware of it. AI can be very confidently wrong, and if the text seems clear, it’s possible to miss that it’s clearly nonsense. Authors want to save some time, but create additional work for the editing team.
Andrew sees LLMs as a useful tool but emphasizes that its field of application is very limited and its output needs to be reviewed by people who deeply care about the end result.
She further questions whether AI actually increases productivity. Potential productivity gains stem from GenAI automating certain tasks. These tasks can as well be automated without AI, Andrew says, AI just makes it more accessible to non-coders. Now that more information, like API references, is made available in a machine-readable format for LLMs, it’s easier to perform non-AI automations.
Again Andrew argues that perceived individual productivity benefits might come from shifting the work onto someone else. For example, writers shift the work onto technical editors or even the readers. [You] might feel more productive, but all you’ve done is move the work around, make someone else’s job or experience measurably worse, and reduce quality. In summary, she asks (emphasis mine):
How can we justify the cost (financial, environmental, and human) of AI, if the reality is a relatively small bump in productivity that could have happened by teaching more people to automate tasks using existing tools or simple coding? Why aren’t businesses encouraging people to use non-AI methods where possible, saving the AI only for where it adds value? Given the societal costs, and the benefit to a business of bringing onboard and training people, perhaps on a balance of things even those tasks where AI is needed are better performed by people.
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge these experiences and amplify these voices. GenAI has catastrophic effects on web development education and learning. It threatens the livelihoods of writers, teachers and communicators who make web technologies approachable and accessible, who nurture the next generation of web authors and developers.
There is no obvious short-term solution. This does not stop some people from posting knee-jerk reactions. I won’t link to these blog posts, but they go like this:
- They advice to ”adapt” to GenAI and “agentic” development and to “come to terms” with the new situation.
- They want to cheer people up by saying “you’ll get used to it”, “you’ll find a new role” – even if the role is cleaning up slop.
- They argue: “You cannot expect the field not to change”. “AI is here to stay.”
These reactions are in essence the same as “you gotta jump on the AI train or you’ll perish”. Such comments are merely turning the knife in the wound.
I cannot give those educators any advice. But I do imagine a more compassionate reaction:
I highly appreciate your work as an educator, writer, researcher, or free and open-source software developer. A heartfelt thank you. I am sorry that AI sucks all joy out of you and your profession.
I acknowledge that AI companies appropriate your labor, destroy your economic livelihood and threaten the foundations of your field.
This very situation won’t get better with more AI, better AI, or developing with or for AI.
In a situation where Big Tech teamed up with fascist movements, it sounds far-fetched, but the bare minimum would be to force the AI oligarchs to pay for the crisis they are imposing on the web community, among others. We need to expropriate the expropriators.
Against the destruction of web development education, I’d like to hold up certain values. In a previous blog post, I described how I once entered web development through a volunteer-driven, non-commercial documentation project.
Such initiatives democratized the web as they helped a wide range of people to establish their own web sites and communities – local businesses, self-employed professionals, art and craft groups, neighborhood initiatives, schools and kindergartens, sports clubs, LGBTQ+ folks, fandoms etc.
Today, we often hear the word “democratize” from GenAI promoters, but it means the exact opposite. AI centralizes power and commodifies knowledge, instead of teaching skills and deep understanding.
The web is a radical democratic medium. Right now, tech oligarchs and fascist movements are trying to dismantle its radical potential. We must ensure that everyone can shape the web.
Participating in independent learning communities, using open technologies based on ethical principles, and building a shared and inclusive digital infrastructure is an act of self-empowerment and emancipation.
Humans need to have the resources to learn, research and teach web publishing skills. It is humans who do all the essential knowledge and education work, and they need to be paid for it.
This sounds trite, but GenAI advocates do not acknowledge it. They let Big Tech get away with appropriating the work of web educators. We cannot make concessions here.
On web development as a whole, Bjarnason draws a bleak conclusion (emphasis mine):
I don’t enjoy my field any more because the field is gone. Assuming that there’s still something there is a mistake. That feeling you have isn’t a frustration with changes to your chosen field. It’s nostalgia for a field that disappeared overnight. What passes as web dev today at large bears no resemblance to the field we built over the years. Everything we learned has been abandoned because companies assume it’s all been encoded into their chosen Large Language Model.
Assuming that’s true, I am guilty of nostalgia. 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.
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