I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch.
It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year.
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:
- Many people are wondering whether developer jobs will even exist in a few months, so they’re reluctant to spend time/money learning new dev skills.
- Even if they do want to learn new dev skills, LLMs can provide personalized tutoring, so there’s less incentive to buy a paid course. [...] 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.
— [Josh W. Comeau](https://bsky.app/profile/joshwcomeau.com/post/3mkxyqgrp2d2t), via [Salma Alam-Naylor](https://whitep4nth3r.com/blog/goodbye-forever-probably/)
Tags: [ai-ethics](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics), [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [generative-ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), [careers](https://simonwillison.net/tags/careers), [josh-comeau](https://simonwillison.net/tags/josh-comeau)
source & further reading
simonwillison.net — original article
Fable's judgement
llm-coding-agent 0.1a0
Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts