In a personal blog post, Baldur Bjarnason describes how training and education projects dropped off one by one, peers shutting down course businesses, and demand for web-dev ebooks cratering—while developers turned to 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 report that GenAI has ruined their business.
Axel Rauschmayer, prolific writer on JavaScript and TypeScript and author of the influential 2ality blog, writes that book-sales income went from enough to live on (2024) to zero (2026), while AI-crawler traffic to free online books rose beyond what he can afford—prompting him to take blog and books offline while deciding next steps.
Salma Alam-Naylor describes AI killing developer education: developers replacing authentic collaboration with chatbots, curricula stolen and regurgitated without consent, and a decision to take a lower-paid developer job without public exposure. She cites Josh W. Comeau and others seeing revenue down 50%+ as people switch to LLMs that slurp work without compensation.
YouTube creator Kyle Cook (Web Dev Simplified) reports views and income roughly halved year-over-year, with more incentive to make easy AI-model videos than hard programming tutorials.
Rachel Andrew reflects on GenAI breaking the relationship between subject-matter experts and editors: AI-introduced subtle inaccuracies create extra editorial work, and perceived productivity gains may just shift work onto editors or readers.
Acknowledgment and values
First and foremost, GenAI has catastrophic effects on web development education and learning. It threatens the livelihoods of writers, teachers and communicators who make web technologies approachable.
Knee-jerk "adapt or perish" reactions turn the knife in the wound. A more compassionate stance acknowledges appropriation of labor and that more AI will not fix educators' economic crisis.
Against destruction of web-dev education, the essay holds up volunteer-driven, non-commercial documentation traditions that once democratized the web—helping local businesses, schools, clubs, and communities establish sites. Today's AI "democratize" rhetoric often means the opposite: centralizing power and commodifying knowledge.
Participating in independent learning communities, using open technologies based on ethical principles, and building shared inclusive digital infrastructure is an act of self-empowerment. Humans need resources to learn, research and teach web publishing skills—and to be paid for that work.
Original: molily.de/web-dev-education