Quoting Josh W. Comeau
Josh W. Comeau has launched his third course, Whimsical Animations, which is on track to sell significantly fewer copies than his previous courses. The decline in sales is attributed to the rise of AI, with many people questioning the need to learn new developer skills and instead opting for personalized tutoring from LLMs. This trend is not unique to Comeau, as other course creators are also experiencing a decline in revenue and engagement due to the shift towards AI-powered learning tools.
- ▪Josh W. Comeau's new course is selling roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch.
- ▪Sales are down significantly from last year for Comeau's courses.
- ▪Other course creators are experiencing a similar decline in revenue and engagement due to AI.
- ▪The rise of AI is causing people to question the need to learn new developer skills.
- ▪LLMs are providing personalized tutoring, reducing the incentive to buy paid courses.
Simon Willison files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 54 of its stories.
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| Original publisher | Simon Willison's Weblog |
| Canonical URL | https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/3/josh-w-comeau/#atom-everything |
| Publication time | 2026-07-03T21:25:52+00:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-03T21:39:15.006Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-03T21:39:15.006Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Vzw0rx_ejwlV |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison's Weblog.
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