Quoting Josh W. Comeau
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-07-03
Josh W. Comeau reports that developer course sales are down 50%+ across multiple creators, attributing the decline to AI eroding both job confidence and the incentive to purchase paid learning resources.
Extraction
Topics: ai-economic-impactdeveloper-educationcreator-economyllm-disruptionai-ethics
Claims
- Josh W. Comeau's new Whimsical Animations course is on track to sell roughly one-third as many copies as a typical launch.
- AI creates a 'double whammy' for course creators: job uncertainty reduces developers' willingness to invest in learning, while LLMs provide free personalized tutoring.
- Multiple course creators report revenue down 50%+ and declining content engagement as learners switch to LLMs.
- LLMs are trained on course creators' content without consent or compensation, compounding the economic harm.
Key quotes
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.
There are likely a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is AI. There's sort of a double whammy with AI.