I sell programming education. So this is not a particularly convenient opinion for me to have. Programming tutorials are dead. Not literally. Somebody will read a Rails tutorial today. Somebody will buy a programming book this week. I will probably write more tutorials myself. What is dying is the old contract around them: I build a clean example application, show you how I implemented something, and then you do the work of translating that example into the application you actually care about.

I have sold developer books and other educational products for years. My own gross revenue from traditional developer education has been moving in the wrong direction. Then Chris Oliver published a pretty blunt update about Go Rails and Hatchbox. In September 2026, while explaining a Hatchbox price increase, Chris wrote that AI had been brutal to education businesses. He said Go Rails had historically subsidized Hatchbox development, that this was no longer sustainable, and that Go Rails would have fewer new customers in 2026 than it had in its first year.

The traditional programming tutorial has a hidden translation step. The author starts with their application, reduces the problem into something teachable, and builds a sample app around it. Then the reader has to move all of that knowledge back into their application. You were always the integration layer. Coding agents changed that. A capable coding agent can inspect the application where the work is actually going to happen. It can see your models, tests, authentication setup, jobs, naming conventions, and existing abstractions. It can search the repository before deciding where something belongs, implement a change, run the tests, inspect the failure, and try again.