If we stop, we lose

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It’s been a rather morale draining era in the making websites industry since the wider tech industry decided to gamble everything on LLMs. We at Piccalilli see it amongst the community and feel it ourselves.

You’ll also have noticed the velocity of posts has slowed down somewhat on this website with no new courses announced either. There’s a couple of reasons for that. First, the numbers have taken a dramatic tumble — industry-wide — but also, aside from being very busy in the studio, we’ve been tired. Swimming against this particular current will do that, even for folks like us that have always operated like that.

Something else you might have noticed is that a lot of other educators have gone a lot quieter this year too. I’m writing this post today to hopefully try and fix that.

I had a delightful conversation with CSS-Tricks head honcho, Geoff, yesterday. Aside from the excellent vibes as a result of CSS-Tricks being back as an independent publisher, I started in a rather glum mood. After spending a few minutes listening to Geoff’s exciting plans though I really perked up.

We’re nowhere near CSS-Tricks here, but we’ve always looked up to them as an example of what years and years at the top of your game looks like. Sure, the DigitalOcean acquisition didn’t work out, but the fact that the publication is not only back, but well up for the fight against the supposed death of web education is really inspiring to me. I needed that win, as did many others.

I needed it so much, it’s spurred me on to write this article to hopefully give us all a shot in the arm.

A comment I see all the time is “we don’t need articles and courses because we can just ask an LLM now”, which I guess is true, but I could also eat an entire can of spray cheese. It ain’t gonna nourish me!

AI technologies have given anyone the ability to bring their ideas to life, but to produce a high quality end product that actually works for the people it needs to work for requires experience, specialist skills and creativity. That is a reality, which aside from Silicon Valley’s best efforts, is why there are still working developers out there, regardless of “frontier model” power. Human developer’s experience is necessary because LLM outputs still (somehow, after hundres of billions of investment) fall short.

Let me repeat that: their experience is necessary. Who inevitably contributed to that experience? Yep: educators.

Let’s get to work then

This article is mainly addressed to fellow educators, but also to people that write on their personal blogs. You must keep going because people still need us. If we don’t, we lose.

The LLM era is opening up an enormous skills gap that’s only going to get wider as the industry continues to pull up the ladder, eliminating entry level positions. We’re needed to help people really understand how all of this stuff works, so even if they are at the behest of LLM mandates, they can produce better outputs.

The technology is going nowhere — that toothpaste is long out of the tube — but how many other hype cycles have underwhelmed in the end?

The economics of the AI industry simply do not work and the technology — albeit ever-present in development — will fall into its actual place eventually, as a niche tool.

With all of this in mind, we’re fighting back too, so I’m opening up the guest authoring on this site again, just like Geoff is over on CSS-Tricks. I’m determined to get this website cooking again and I would love to share your words with the rest of the industry.

Let’s buck up our ideas and get cracking, everyone. There’s lots to teach and I know we’ve got plenty of fight left in us.

You and me, we’re not done until we say we’re done

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AuthorAndy Bell

Founder of Piccalilli and Set Studio. Author of Complete CSS, co-author of Every Layout and co-author of Learn CSS.

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