AI is taking over a layer of what you paid to learn

"This launch has been my worst in years." The line comes from Josh W. Comeau, a well-regarded instructor who teaches frontend development and has a gift for making CSS and JavaScript make sense. In early July he went public: sales of his latest course round had clearly dropped, and the course hadn't gotten any worse. What he sells is explanation. You pay for a person to look at your code and tell you why the layout broke or why that logic misbehaves. Workflow courses for n8n, parameter-tuning courses for Stable Diffusion: those sell operation, the months you spend learning a pipeline and its settings. People used to pay for both, because explanation and operation each took time to acquire. LLMs now do explanation for free, never impatient, and tailored to your own code. Claude writes the whole workflow for you and asks whether that step is even necessary. Image tools fold the settings away and hand you the result. The explanation layer and the operation layer are both being pushed toward free at the same time. Each used to be its own market, because each used to take time to learn. The course didn't get worse, and the reputation is intact. AI took over the market for that learning time. Which layer hasn't AI entered? Judgment. Whether to sign up for that course, whether a tool deserves months of your time, whether to keep your current process, whether to send this proposal, whether the deal on the table is worth taking. AI can lay out the options and price out the consequences of each, but "which one is right for my situation" is still yours to confirm, because you hold context that AI wasn't there for. Comeau's course didn't get worse. That layer of knowledge now has a new owner.