Web educators report falling income as AI reshapes learning
Baldur Bjarnason’s blog post gathers accounts of weaker demand and earnings from web development educators, while calling for support for human-led learning.
Web development educators and creators are reporting lower income, demand and audience engagement, with some attributing the declines to the use of generative AI tools. In a personal blog post, Baldur Bjarnason argues that the changes threaten the livelihoods of people who teach and explain web technologies.
Bjarnason says his training projects have wound down, demand for his web development ebooks has fallen and peers who sold courses are closing their businesses. The accounts in the post are individual reports; they do not establish an industry-wide trend or isolate AI as the cause.
JavaScript and TypeScript author Axel Rauschmayer says book income that provided a living wage in 2024 had fallen to zero by 2026. He says AI crawler traffic to his blog and free online books became unaffordable, prompting him to take them offline while considering what to do next.
Other contributors describe similar pressures. Course creator Josh W. Comeau reports revenue down more than 50 per cent and less engagement, while YouTube creator Kyle Cook says views and income from programming tutorials have roughly halved. Salma Alam-Naylor describes burnout and says she has stepped away from public-facing work.
Technical writer and editor Rachel Andrew raises a separate concern: AI-generated inaccuracies can require editors to apply extra scrutiny, shifting work to editing teams and readers. She says AI output needs review by people with deep knowledge of the subject.
Bjarnason argues for paying human educators and supporting independent learning communities. He says those communities help people build web skills and share knowledge, though the post offers no short-term remedy for the losses contributors describe.
