Quoting Josh W. Comeau

The Trigger: A New Course Reveals the Hidden Wound of AI-Era Education Josh W. Comeau, a star instructor in the front-end development community, recently launched his third course, Whimsical Animations, only to find sales at just one-third of a typical launch. His older courses also saw significant revenue declines. More alarmingly, multiple course creators he spoke with report the same trend—revenue halved, engagement plummeting. They all point to a common culprit: AI.

The Breakdown: How Does AI Deliver a ‘Double Whammy’? Josh’s ‘double whammy’ framing is spot-on. The first blow is psychological: as large language models like GPT and Claude demonstrate growing coding prowess, many developers doubt whether their jobs will exist in a few months. Facing such uncertainty, people naturally tighten their belts and reduce investment in ‘future skills.’ After all, why pay to learn React animations if AI might replace you tomorrow?

The second blow is even more direct: even if you want to learn, why buy a course? In the past, developers would search for tutorials or purchase courses, following a teacher step by step. Now, you can open ChatGPT or Claude, describe your problem, and instantly get a targeted solution, along with explanations and even debugging help. This ‘instant gratification’ feels far more efficient than any prerecorded course—and it’s free. Josh pointedly notes that these models ‘slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation,’ a form of predation on creators.

Trending Insight: The Underlying Logic of Paid Knowledge Is Being Rewritten This story reveals much more than declining course sales. The traditional paid-knowledge model relied on an ‘information gap’ and ‘systematic curation’—experts would digest complex knowledge and reshape it into digestible lessons. But AI can now instantly complete the entire process of understand-reorganize-teach, nearly erasing the information advantage. More crucially, AI provides unlimited patience and on-demand customization that no human instructor can match.

However, we must also see the other side. LLMs excel at giving answers but are poor at helping people build a knowledge framework. I’ve spoken with many self-learners who use AI for programming; they ask every time they hit a snag and seem to solve many bugs, but their knowledge remains fragmented. Without AI, they feel helpless. Systematic courses still hold irreplaceable value—they force you through a designed cognitive path and build sturdy mental models. The era of simply selling videos may be ending.

Practical Value: What This Means for Learners, Educators, and the Industry For learners: Treat AI as a preview and review tool, but rely on structured input for core learning. Identify skills that AI cannot yet replace—like system design, architectural decision-making, and complex debugging thinking—these may require following an experienced mentor.

For educators: Creators like Josh may need to transform. On one hand, course content should emphasize hands-on projects, code reviews, and real-time collaboration that AI struggles to provide. On the other hand, educators can embrace AI by designing courses that teach human-AI pairing, which itself could be a selling point. Exploring subscription models or community-driven approaches may also prove more sustainable than one-off course sales.

A Counterintuitive Angle: AI Might Actually Magnify the Value of ‘Good Courses’ An easily overlooked viewpoint: when free information floods the market, the cost of filtering for quality content rises. A meticulously designed course with a clear learning path and community support becomes scarcer than ever. ‘Shovelware’ courses that merely rehash documentation will die first, while those that genuinely help people achieve cognitive leaps will stand out like a lighthouse in a storm. Of course, this requires educators to produce content far beyond AI’s ‘information patchwork,’ which is itself a daunting challenge.

AI is reshaping the boundaries of learning. This is not just a business-model headache but a fundamental re-examination of what it means to become a professional.