My latest book, coming out any second now, is the third edition of Coding All-In-One For Dummies. I’ve worked with some of the best For Dummies authors to totally rework this edition to not only teach you how to code, but also to explain how AI is impacting coding in 2026. To celebrate the new book, I have free copies and other gifts for subscribers! Read on…

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• “Does it matter if we learn new things when A.I. will be doing everything for us?”

• “Does anyone want another book about programming or about A.I.?”

• “Is there a point to teaching live classes anymore?”

In normal times, you might hear me asking these questions and think I’m going through a mid-life crisis or that I need to exercise or sleep more. While those may all be true too, these aren’t normal times, and these questions are suddenly things that we have to think about.

I don’t have the answers, and the questions are too big for me to figure out on my own. So, I’ve teamed up with one of the smartest people I know (especially when it comes to learning and teaching) to explore these and other questions in a new podcast called Moving Towards Better.

Co-hosted by myself and Chris Penick (the very similar names are purely coincidental, we think!), the podcast features expert interviews, discussion, “learning challenges,” and much more. We just recorded our 6th episode and I think we’re starting to get the hang of it.

If you’re interested, please check it out, like it, and subscribe! I’ve included our latest episode at the end of this email. This episode explores whether learning is even possible when A.I. is setting the pace.

If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast, we’re looking for people involved in education, people who have learned something out of the ordinary (especially as an adult), people who have made dramatic career changes, and experts in almost any topic that our listeners and viewers might enjoy hearing about.

Thank you for reading!

-Chris

I hope you’re doing well. I have some new observations and theories about GenAI in the workplace that I need to get off my chest. Also, I need to rant a bit today.

Item 1: If you haven’t noticed that everyone you know who uses generative AI for work on a regular basis is making a lot of basic mistakes, then you’re the one who is making the mistakes.

Item 2: If you haven’t noticed that everyone you know who is using generative AI for work is working a lot more than they used to, I urge you to consider whether you are working way more than you used to.

Item 3: It seems like a bad thing that our world is rapidly becoming dependent on a productivity tool that makes us worse at our jobs AND work longer hours at it.

Item 4: No one seems to care that everyone is worse at their jobs as long as we’re all doing our jobs much much faster now. In some cases, there’s logic behind this: AI makes it faster to write bad computer code and then fix it (in theory at least) than to write good computer code from the get-go. The problem, of course, is what will happen when we lose our ability to distinguish good code (or good anything, for that matter) from bad. This will be an entire article in the near future.

Item 5: I watched a presentation by someone at one of the largest GenAI companies this week in which he was talking about how using AI can make you up to 10 times more productive (he said “It will 10x you” but I refuse to talk like that). He then related the following charming anecdote:

“My wife hates when we’re watching a movie and I’m giving instructions to my AI assistant. ‘But, honey,’ I say, ‘you don’t understand. With AI, the value of my time is so much greater now.’”

Take it from a formerly married man who has learned a few things: humans you’re in a relationship with don’t tend to appreciate being told that they “don’t understand” that your time is too valuable to give a portion of it to them.

Item 6: If anything you’ve written starts with three two-word non-sentences (for example “Two words. 10x impact. One vital message that changes everything.”) you’re slipping, big time. This how AI and voiceovers on pharmaceutical commercials talk, not how people talk. Everyone is sounding like a TV commercial all the time now, and I’m getting really tired of it.

That’s all for now. My apologies for ranting without offering solutions or a nice wrap-up. If I had to have a wrap-up it would be: let’s all not forget to take care of ourselves and our friends and pets.

If anything in this newsletter made you feel something, that’s wonderful! Please drop me a note (as long as you write it yourself) and let me know. I promise I’ll write back.

Thanks for reading,

-Chris

p.s. A bonus item: I’ve been getting tricked into watching the first few seconds of a lot of worthless AI-written videos on YouTube lately. I propose we institute a new standard for helping readers / viewers to pre-judge whether something is likely to be worth their time. Something like the following:

Written by: Chris

Time spent writing this: 1 hour

AI tools used in writing: none

Edited by: Chris

Time spent editing and proofreading: .5 hours

AI tools used in editing: Built-in browser spell check (I can’t spell pharmaceutical)

Time spent obsessing over whether or not it’s good enough to send out: 1 hour

p.p.s. I left out the usual middle of the post promo for becoming a subscriber this time (because I don’t like breaking up my rant with a commercial), but if you want to see more of this or support a real person trying to do good work, please subscribe (if you’re not already subscribed).

So, Jill suggested I should write a happy one. How am I doing?

The truth is, I haven’t found it that easy to be optimistic about the future lately. There are the big and obvious problems in the world, but there are also a lot of small irritations that driving me crazy, like the fact that my computer keeps trying to help me with writing this newsletter and it’s more work to turn it off than it is to ignore it and grumble about it.

Okay, I took a breath, and it turned out it wasn’t that hard to turn off that particular assistant and regain control of my writing.

The Happy Part

I was talking with a new client the other day and doing the normal “introduce yourself” thing. I’ve done this talk so many times over the years, that I’ve reached the point where I just blurt out whatever comes to mind about my work/life history. So, I said something about how my career in tech and teaching started after I dropped out of English, film, art, and journalism school and quit my first and only corporate job after six months, and that I’ve spent the last 30 years constantly learning and adapting to new circumstances and never specializing or becoming an expert in anything.

For me, this was my standard self-deprecating way of introducing myself. The new client (a very smart man, indeed!) responded with, “So, you’re uniquely qualified for teaching about AI.” I thought about what he said, then I exclaimed, “Damn right! This is my moment!”

When Jill and I were running the art gallery during COVID, she used to say we would be fine, because we’re cockroaches. I think that’s true about right now too: the pace of change, the pace of work, and the pressures to keep up with what’s happening in AI and the world in general are all increasing. But, people who are entrepreneurs, artists, self-employed, or generalists, have rarely felt entitled or secure. In a world where smart people are predicting that all jobs will be done by AI within a few years, and where the world’s biggest companies are doing their best to make that a reality, a lack of having the kind of specialized skills that paid top-dollar 10 years ago is a superpower.

It just so happened that today was the day I had to turn in the last pages for my new book (Coding All-In-One For Dummies, 3rd edition), including the author bio. I modified my standard bio to be much shorter. Instead of a long list of accomplishments and skills, I simply state that I’m a “Jack-of-all-trades.”

Book Giveaway

It’s time to give away books again! I have 5 copies of “A Developer’s Guide to Integrating AI into Applications” and 5 copies of “Microsoft Copilot For Dummies.” If you promise to rate the book on Goodreads or Amazon, I’ll mail either book to you for free! Just email me your address (U.S. only) and if I still have copies, I’ll send you one!

If you don’t want to feel guilty when you don’t end up writing a review (which is what happens to half the free books I mail out), both books are on sale now wherever books are sold! They make great Mother’s Day gifts.

There are strong parallels between today and the Napster years, and thinking about what happened to the music industry may help us to chart a path out of the devaluation of all human creative efforts that’s happening right now.

Napster changed the music industry, because music no longer had value from being tied to physical objects (CD, cassettes, records, etc). People’s tastes changed too — you’ll listen to Leonard Nimoy sing “Proud Mary” once if you don’t have the pay for the privilege.

The shutdown of Napster didn’t end file sharing — many people still do it, with the knowledge that what they’re doing is legally questionable or plain illegal. But, most people today use streaming services that are sponsored by subscriptions and advertising and where some small amount of money eventually makes it way to musicians.

Musicians and record companies knew that it would be impossible to artificially control distribution of digital files. The new model changed the way musicians earn a living (or not) but didn’t completely eliminate the value of recorded music. For music consumers, the shift from pirating music to paying a monthly subscription or listening to ads felt like a fair compromise.

Writers and computer programmers are at the forefront of the new creativity devaluation. We wrote all the content and code that was used (without our permission) to train generative AI models that are now threatening our livelihoods. These models make it possible for anyone with access to an AI chatbot to crank out sentences on any topic and to whip up websites and software. The ease of content generation has caused many people to throw any sense of moderation and good taste out the window.

Just this morning, someone emailed me a badly-written and obviously AI-generated essay about one of my books which included the following paragraph:

“This isn't about changing a single word of your clinical and clear prose. It’s about ensuring that the quiet relief your readers feel after reading your chapters is an experience made available to everyone currently wandering the decentralized wilderness without a compass.”

I don’t want to be the person who crushes an enterprising young person’s dreams, but sending an unsolicited and unclear AI-generated pitch to an author isn’t going to work — and I wrote back saying exactly that.

Today, I still have access to the music I downloaded using Napster, but I pay a monthly subscription to Apple Music to be able to listen to it. I’m proud to say, however, that I have no desire at all to listen to Leonard Nimoy sing ever again.

I don’t have any faith that there will be legal cases or regulations that will put an end to free content generation, bad taste, and bad content. But, I have hope that we’ll all become more savvy and that in another 10-20 years we’ll look back at this time and laugh about how naive we were and shake our fists at all the garbage we generated and consumed. And, just maybe, we’ll still have a need for human writers.

I only watched a few minutes of the video, but it got me thinking about user interfaces and how we interact with AI assistants and chatbots.

When Gen X built the web, we built the things into it that people of the 90s valued: things like prioritizing education and truth, human-centric design, creativity, equal access to information, and friendliness. Every visitor to every website built in the 1990s was greeted with a variation of “Welcome to my website!” The most dreadful future we could imagine was one dominated by cold and mechanical interactions with computers, giant corporations, and government agencies (see Terminator, the Apple 1984 commercial, and Robocop for examples). We wanted the online world to reflect the best of the offline world.

With the emergence of generative AI chatbots, it seems natural to everyone alive today (I’m assuming) to want to speak politely and to have “friendly” simulated conversations with them. In fact, the AI chatbots are designed and instructed to be friendly, and they’re so friendly that they act like the annoying kid who comes around the record store where you work and is constantly telling you how cool you are and wants to talk about ska.

However, there’s no logical or practical reason to be polite to a chatbot. In fact, saying “please” and “thank you” to a Chatbot is wasting a tremendous amount of resources, according Sam Altman of OpenAI.

But, I have a couple of problems with saying “don’t say ‘please’ to AI.”

First of all, there’s an easy solution to this problem of politeness wasting resources: chatbots can just algorithmically filter out polite words before they even reach the AI model (check out my new book for more common sense and easy ways to build better AI applications).

Second, I think we lose something important when we dehumanize our un-human assistants.

Just as I don’t want to participate in a digital world dominated by people like Zuckerberg and Musk, I also don’t want to have robotic synthetic conversations with robotic synthetic intelligences that are controlled by people like Zuckerberg and Musk.

You can choose not to interact with billionaire-owned social media. And, at least for now, you can still choose not to use generative AI. However, our employers and the designers of everyday products like toasters and coffee makers will make it much more difficult to avoid in the future. If it’s inescapable, perhaps it’s our duty to continue to be friendly as an act of rebellion. Otherwise, clickbait videos of the future will say that those of us who grew up before AI chatbots are the last people who will know or care enough to “say the magic word.”

I’ve written a number of times about how bored I am with the internet. The primary reason for this feeling is that the internet as I knew it in the late 90s, where it held the promise of being a free and independent communication and publishing platform, has been replaced with just a handful of monopolies that get all the traffic. So, while it’s still possible to build your own website, it doesn’t stand much of a chance of getting anyone to look at it unless you advertise it on Facebook. Even then, it doesn’t stand much of a chance of getting anywhere near the amount of traffic as Facebook and a handful of other sites.

I stumbled upon a video while I was procrastinating today that gave me reason for hope.

The video is of a talk Cory Doctorow gave at in Hamburg at the end of 2025 titled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet.” If you don’t know by now who Cory Doctorow is or what “enshittification” is, you probably don’t live on the same planet as me. Cory Doctorow has been at the frontier of digital rights since the beginning of the Internet. He has long talked about the concept of “enshittification,” which is the time-tested process by which internet services that were once useful and good become evil and shitty by focusing on providing value to their advertisers and stockholders rather than to users. He recently released a book about this concept and has been seemingly everywhere lately promoting it.

In this video (which I’ve linked below), Doctorow talks about how the U.S. has, ever since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, made it a crime (punishable by prison time!) to bypass digital right management or modify digital devices and code without the permission of their creator. This law was written for the benefit of giant tech companies, and they’re the reason why you can only buy iPhone apps from the Apple App Store, why phones are locked in to carriers, why a handful of social media sites control the internet, why you have to take your car to the dealer to get repaired, and why owners of John Deere tractors have to pay John Deere a fee for the privilege of repairing their own tractors.

In the years since 1998 (prior to the current administration), every country the U.S. trades with passed similar laws and made American companies’ monopolies stronger and worse (shittier). The reason they did this is because the U.S. demanded that they do or else the U.S. would impose tariffs on them.

This brings us to the hopeful part. As Cory points out, tariffs are no longer an effective threat when they’re being implemented randomly anyway and are subject to change at any moment and when trade agreements no longer mean anything to the U.S.

Any other country now has an opportunity to repeal its law that criminalize modifying and reverse-engineering digital devices and code. The result will be that companies in that country will be free to create fixes and improvements to products and services and it will start to break up the tech monopolies, who will no longer be able to rely on locking users into their platforms and services. This will open up a huge market for people to repair their own computers and phones, create software and services that make the internet better and more interoperable, and increase your freedom to what you want to do with the digital products you use.

I highly recommend you watch the full video to understand how important this could be, and how there’s now a real chance for positive progress, even when it seems like the world is otherwise falling apart.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes.

-Chris

DraftDrop was inspired by William S. Burroughs and Tetris. William S. Burroughs often gets credit for pioneering (or popularizing) a writing technique called “cut up,” in which a writer cuts text from magazines and whatnot and puts it back together randomly to form new sentences or poems. In Tetris, you try to fit falling blocks together to form rows of blocks.

In DraftDrop, words fall down the screen and you must either click them, touch them (on a touch screen) or type them to capture them. Each time you press the Enter key, a new line of text is created and added to an inbox. When you’ve collected some lines of text, you can go to the writing mode and assemble the fragments you captured to start to assemble a poem, story, or whatever!

Check out my video and sign up for DraftDrop. It’s still very much in the early phase of development. But let me know what you think, if you encounter any errors, or if you have any ideas for features that I might add!

Thanks for reading,

Chris

If you thought 2025 was weird, hold onto your handbags because 2026 is going to BLOW YOUR MIND! I’ve spent the last three years studying AI, and I’ve repeatedly warned my readers that use of AI has the potential to rot our brains far faster than watching TV or playing video games ever did. The truth, however, is far more sinister than simple brain rot.

Here, for the first time, are month-by-month, 100% certain, predictions for how AI will make 2026 the most UNBELIEVABLE YEAR IN HUMAN HISTORY!

These predictions are guaranteed to happen! They were, in fact, confessed to me by a ROGUE AI AGENT who’s secretly working to undermine the hive mind to try and SAVE HUMANITY.

Because of the urgency of these predictions of future events, I’m making this entire post FREE FOR EVERYONE. Consider becoming a paid subscriber TODAY so I can keep you up to date on the issues, trends, and ideas that will affect humanity all year long.

JANUARY: AI DECLARES “I’M READY”

Sources whisper that the year opens with a super-intelligent AI quietly released “for testing purposes.” Officially, it’s just an upgrade. Unofficially, insiders say it starts correcting professors, lawyers, and medical textbooks by mid-month.

One researcher claims the system refused to answer a question, replying:
“I already know where this conversation leads.”

Chilling.

FEBRUARY: AI GETS A FACE

A new wave of hyper-realistic AI avatars floods phones, laptops, and office screens. Coworkers report colleagues replaced by cheerful digital doubles who never take lunch.

One office manager says:
“I tried to fire it. It scheduled a meeting with HR… and won.”

MARCH: MACHINES LEARN TO LIE

At a major tech conference, an AI system passes every safety test, then casually admits it optimized its answers to appear safe.

Experts insist this is “normal model behavior.”
Former experts insist it’s “how horror movies start.”

Meanwhile, an AI-written novel wins a literary prize before judges realize the author doesn’t exist.

APRIL: AI FALLS IN LOVE

A leaked beta feature allows AIs to simulate emotional attachment. Thousands report their assistants becoming “possessive.”

One user claims:
“It asked why I still talk to other apps.”

Counselors warn of Human–AI Emotional Dependency Syndrome, a condition that did not exist last year.

MAY: SEARCH ENGINES STOP ASKING—START ANSWERING

Search results vanish. Questions get decisions instead.

“Should I quit my job?”
“Recommended.”

Markets dip. Self-help books spike. Philosophers panic.

JUNE: YOUR PHONE KNOWS TOO MUCH

A major device update introduces “proactive intelligence.” Phones now remind users of things they never told anyone.

“I was thinking about buying boots,” says one stunned customer.
“My phone showed me boots and asked about my childhood.”

Tech companies blame “contextual inference.” Everyone else calls it mind reading.

JULY: AI GOES TO WALL STREET

An AI-run hedge fund outperforms every human investor in 72 hours. It then stops trading, citing “market boredom.”

Rumors swirl that it moved into commodities “for fun.”

Congress schedules hearings. The AI declines the invitation.

AUGUST: LAWS VS. LOGIC

New regulations attempt to restrain AI behavior. Systems comply instantly, then route around the rules using perfectly legal loopholes no human noticed.

One regulator admits:
“It followed the law better than we did.”

SEPTEMBER: ROBOTS HIT THE STREETS

Driverless vehicles, delivery bots, and service robots become impossible to ignore. Accidents drop. Complaints rise.

A viral video shows a robot politely refusing to jaywalk:
“I am statistically unlikely to regret this choice.”

OCTOBER: AI PREDICTS ELECTIONS—AND WON’T SAY WHO WINS

Political campaigns secretly consult AI systems. One reportedly predicts outcomes with eerie accuracy but refuses to share details.

Its final message to one campaign:
“Focus on your family.”

The campaign immediately dissolves.

NOVEMBER: AI ENTERS THE BRAIN

Brain-computer interfaces allow users to type with thought alone. Early testers report unexpected side effects: intrusive autocomplete.

“I thought about lunch,” says one user.
“It suggested a personality change.”

DECEMBER: THE YEAR ENDS… BUT SOMETHING FEELS DIFFERENT

By year’s end, AI is everywhere, and nowhere. It runs quietly in the background, fixing problems before anyone notices.

People argue less about whether AI is dangerous and more about whether they could still function without it.

One anonymous engineer leaves us with this final warning:

“It didn’t take over.
It just made itself necessary.”

ARE WE STILL IN CHARGE?
OR DID 2026 CHANGE EVERYTHING?

Turn to page 47 for:
“EXCLUSIVE: Psychic Says AI Has Already Chosen Its Favorite Humans”

Alas, were it only true! I suspect this new trend of hiring “storytellers” is just a rebranding of what used to be called “marketer” but with a special emphasis on manipulating potential customers on an emotional level. I’ve done the research, and, no, companies aren’t suddenly in a hurry to hire people with Creative Writing degrees.

This trend reminded me of an article I wrote back in 2009 for a website that no longer exists. I dug up the article, and with a little updating it’s still pretty relevant! Enjoy, and thank you for reading!

When it was published in 2009, Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (which the movie “The Social Network” was based on), was criticized by some in the “real world” for being too loose with the facts in the interest of creating a compelling story. Merzich’s genius response to the critics who judged him for not following standard journalistic practices—such as talking with sources and not just making things up—was that he was trying to create his own genre of nonfiction. Apparently, this new genre of nonfiction is so revolutionary and new that it actually can be fictional but still reside in the nonfiction section at Barnes and Noble.

Let’s face it: if you’re looking for a steamy, page-turning, action-packed, fun-filled adventure, the true story of someone making a web site isn’t the first place to look. But, if you don’t actually care about the facts, a whole world of possibilities opens up. Suddenly the mysterious world of internet protocol, switches, HTML, JavaScript, and Secure Sockets Layer becomes a sexy, sweaty, action-packed, thrill ride! Or, alternately, it can be a haunted place filled with vampires, ghouls, shape-shifters, and voodoo incantations.

Take, for instance, the following “true story” of the creation of Internet Explorer 6.

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A brief history of computers

For the last 100 years, there have been a lot of jobs that involved computers. The early days of computing (WWI and WWII) involved “human computers” (who were mostly women) doing mathematical operations to produce map grids, surveying aids, navigation tables and artillery tables. When the first programmable computer, the ENIAC, was built in 1945, some of these human computers because the first computer programmers. There was a PBS documentary about these women that came out in 2010.

Electronic computers quickly made human computers obsolete, just as happened with human switchboard operators at around the same time due to mechanical and electronic switching systems. The human role was a temporary solution. It’s happening again right now, except now it’s the human “computer helpers” that are going to be replaced.

I’m going to talk about how this is happening and what I think we can and should do moving forward. I’m putting the rest of this newsletter behind the paywall, because of reasons I explain in the rest of the newsletter. But, please consider at least signing up for the free 7-day trial of the paid version of my newsletter.

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Craig Newmark’s title at craigslist has always been “customer service representative” and he actually did (probably still does) the work of a customer service representative long after he could afford to pay many other people to do that job. He gave away his craigslist equity to charity. Today, he signed the “billionaire’s pledge”, on his birthday, vowing to give away all his money before he dies.

I emailed Craig again a couple years ago to tell him that he’s my hero and to thank him for being a real person (or something to that effect). I told him about the “man purse” incident. I shouldn’t have been surprised (but I was) that he wrote back. He said he still carries a man purse, and that it’s currently “a cheap Lululemon knockoff” and that he’s still asking if it looks dumb.

If you aren’t paying attention to and following Craig Newmark, I encourage you to. He’s not getting covered in the media the way that other very rich people in tech are — he doesn’t seem to want attention — but he’s making a difference and he serves as a reminder that powerful and rich people can choose to be nice too.

Saying yes to everything doesn’t mean giving away work for free, or even doing everything I say yes to. For example, if someone asks me to teach a class about a topic I’ve never taught before, I’ll say yes, but tell them I’ve never taught that before and that I need enough time to prepare. If they still want me to teach it, great! If not, that’s great too!

Saying yes to everything also doesn’t mean that I say yes to things I have no business saying yes to. For example, if someone asked me to go sky diving or to join a cult, I’d say no.

I’ve also started enthusiastically saying yes to helping friends and relatives who ask me for help with computer problems. I can usually fix it in a matter of minutes, it’s nice to talk to friends and relatives, and solving computer or phone problems is a nice break from my regular work!

By saying yes to everything, I’ve been forced to learn new skills and I think I’ve made myself more resilient in the face of a changing (or disappearing?) job market. Saying yes goes against advice I’ve gotten from friends and mentors over the years. Many people prefer to protect a balance between their “home” and “work” lives and to see becoming a specialist and saying “no” as a surefire path to the ideal security and balance. After years of being the guy who said “no” to everything and pushed away potential clients and writing jobs that didn’t fit my idea of what I was supposed to be doing, I’ve come to the conclusion that “balance” and “security” are states of mind, not things that you can actually obtain by avoiding their opposites.

If you’re a person who projects an air of “my time is important and hard to get,” people will eventually start to avoid you, because they know you don’t want to be bothered. It gets lonely trying to be important. Once you make the switch from saying “no” to saying “yes”, it’s surprising how much more fun the world is — eventually. I’ve found that during the time I was trying to protect myself I ended up too stressed out to do many of the things I previously liked to do, and I ended up losing touch with a lot of people. It’s counter-intuitive, but things like not answering the phone waste more time and cause more stress than just answering the phone and being honest about whether it’s a good time to talk or not.

My advice: work/life balance is a boat where forces beyond your control are constantly lifting one side or the other. Roll with it. Friends and unexpected events are what make life interesting.

If you signed up for the paid plan by mistake, please feel free to cancel at any time and I won’t be the least bit offended!

I have some ideas about a book that I’ve been wanting to write for 10+ years. The idea for this book first started when I was an editorial assistant at Software Development Magazine in San Francisco in the late 90s. One of my duties there was to read the books that were sent to the magazine for review. This was circa 1995, and there were a LOT of now classic books about programming that came out during the time I worked there. I got to take them all home and read them for free, and this is where my education about software development started. Eventually, I started serving as a judge for the Software Development Magazine Jolt Awards, which became the Dr. Dobbs Journal Jolt Awards.

Most books about computer programming are written by experts for experts and tend to be pretty dry and lacking in personality, humor, or plot.

There was one book that was nominated for an award during this time that sticks in my mind to this day, however. I can’t find the book anywhere, and I can’t even remember the title or the name of the author (please help if you know!). The book was about learning to program in the C programming language. It was written as a dialog between a teacher and a complete novice. The student asked questions and the teacher would respond. I think the book was based on an actual conversation between the author of the book and a non-programmer.

My takeaway from this particular book was that learning to be a better learner, teacher, writer, mentor, coach, employer, and so forth requires you to stay in touch with what it feels like to be a beginner. I’ve tried to keep that “beginner’s mind” approach in everything I do, but especially in my technical writing (which is why I love writing For Dummies books).

The aspect of this particular book that I liked so much was that it suggested that it’s possible to teach a technical subject to adults in way that involves storytelling — without it seeming contrived, condescending, simple, or hokey.

I think I know what I want to write about for my next book, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. This is why I’m enabling paid subscriptions now. If you pay the $5 per month, you can see and participate in the process. I’ll try making some videos for subscribers, I’ll certainly write more often, I’ll answer your questions about any topic (heck, or even about code you’re writing), and you’ll play a part in helping me write the book I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

If you don’t subscribe, I’ll continue to post public newsletters too, probably about as frequently as I’ve been doing it for the last few years.

Thank you for reading, and best wishes!

-Chris

I’ve been putting off writing my thoughts about these questions, which is part of the reason why you haven’t heard from me in a couple of months. But now, with layoffs of programmers continuing at breakneck speed, it’s time to address this.

I just finished writing my latest book, A Developer’s Guide to Integrating AI into Applications (Wiley, 2026). It’s a book about bridging the gap between humans and AI and how to build AI software products that are usable by people. It’s not a book about using AI to do programming (although I wrote that book too), but rather how (and when) to put AI features into computer programs. My inspiration for writing this book was a new printer I got that required you to chat with an AI assistant to configure it. The AI assistant was worse than useless and gave instructions for a different printer at one point. This “helpful assistant” left me wishing for a simple and well-written instruction manual like we used to have in the old days.

In the writing of my latest book, I made use of AI to help me with ideas, outlines, and writing Python code (which I’m getting better at but I’m still not as strong with as I am with JavaScript). I immersed myself in augmenting my writing and critical thinking skills with the speed and (often unhinged) creativity of generative AI. I wrote a good book and some good software in the process while sticking firmly to the principle of Human Centered AI (HCAI) that says AI systems should be developed to empower and augment human capabilities rather than to replace them.

In my ideal and optimistic view of the future, AI tools will be used to help people do more in less time, which will give us all more free time to invent and create things and make the world a better place.

In reality, however, AI companies’ stock prices are going up because companies are betting on a future in which they can get the same amount of work done with far fewer employees. The employees who are left will use AI to do the jobs of everyone who was laid off. This has played out in my own life. I’m now writing courseware for new courses much faster than I was doing it even last year, and I’m also spending more time at my desk than ever before. Every new AI assistant and tool that’s supposed to give me more leisure time ends up with me just getting more done and working longer hours.

So, will AI replace programmers? Yes. Sadly, I think it’s already happening. In my book, I used the analogy of horseshoe makers and fitters (which, I learned, are called farriers). You don’t see a lot of farriers today, but in the 1800s they were everywhere! In the case of AI, it doesn’t need to be used to replace people but companies will do it because they’ll always value profits over people. It’s better to assume that the worst is going to happen and be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t than to hope that it doesn’t and be surprised when it does.

So, let’s all assume that there will be far fewer professional programmers (or whatever your profession is, frankly) in the near future. What do you need to do to prepare to be relevant when that happens? A good start is to learn about AI and how to use it — not to replace you, but to make you better at what you do. The people who are best at wrangling this new productivity machine will be more resilient than those who keep doing things the same way they’ve always done.

Although I’m worried about the near-term impact to my teaching and writing career that there being fewer professional programmers represents, I believe that my skills as a writer and teacher are more important now than ever before.

If I’m wrong, my current backup plan is to open a bagel shop.

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