The Signal from the Other Side
If you exist in the web development orbit, you’ve likely seen the video by now. Jeffrey Way, the founder of Laracasts, posted a video titled "I'm Done."
For the Rails community, Jeffrey is the PHP equivalent of Ryan Bates (Railscasts) or Chris Oliver (GoRails). He is a titan of developer education. In December 2025, he laid off 40% of his staff. Three weeks later, he announced he was stepping back from the daily grind.
The kicker? In the months leading up to the collapse, his team produced the highest quality content in the platform's history. The audio was crisp, the code was clean, and the pacing was perfect.
And it didn't matter.
Subscriptions tanked. Why? Because developers stopped searching for "how to build a blog" and started asking Cursor, Copilot, or ChatGPT to "build me a blog."
The Rails Parallel
We are watching the economics of developer education collapse in real-time.
I remember buying a subscription to Laracasts years ago (despite being a Rails dev) simply because Jeffrey’s teaching style was universal. We did the same with Railscasts back in the day. We watched 15-minute videos to learn the syntax, the "Rails Way," and the boilerplate.
But Jeffrey said something in that video that haunts me—and excites me:
"I am having more fun programming than I ever have in my lifetime."
He noted that he is now completing two-to-three-week projects in twenty minutes. He is watching his education business struggle while his personal productivity skyrockets.
This is the paradox that every Rails developer needs to internalize right now.
The Shift: From Writer to Editor-in-Chief
For the last 15 years, our job has been The Writer.
We memorized the syntax for has_many :through. We looked up the docs for Active Job. We hand-typed migrations. We were paid for our ability to produce syntactically correct text.
AI has crashed the value of "producing text" to near zero.
We are now entering the era of The Editor-in-Chief.
You are no longer the person painting every stroke on the canvas. You are the Art Director. You tell the AI (the junior painter) what you want, you review the output, you spot the N+1 query it introduced, and you tell it to refactor.
Rails 8 and the "One Person Team"
This shift validates everything DHH has been preaching with Rails 8.
Rails has always been about "The One Person Framework"—giving a single developer the power to do the work of a team.
- Solid Queue replaces the Redis/Ops team.
- Kamal replaces the DevOps team.
- Hotwire replaces the Frontend React team.
Now, add AI to that stack.
If Jeffrey Way can finish a 3-week project in 20 minutes, what can a senior Rails developer do with the Omakase stack and an LLM?
We are approaching a singularity where a single Rails developer can build, deploy, and scale a SaaS that used to require $2M in funding and a staff of 10.
The Danger Zone
The danger here is for the juniors—and the "tutorial dependent."
If you rely on tutorials to tell you exactly what to type, you are obsolete. The AI can type it faster.
The value now lies in Architecture and Taste.
- The AI can write the code, but it doesn't know what code to write.
- It doesn't know that your domain requires a polymorphic association here.
- It doesn't know that this specific business logic belongs in a Service Object, not the Controller.
That is the job now.
Conclusion
Jeffrey Way’s video was sad, but it was also a bellwether. The era of watching a 20-minute video to learn how to implement a file uploader is over. We just ask the AI to do it.
But the era of the Product Engineer—the developer who uses Rails and AI to ship actual value at breakneck speed—is just beginning.
Stop trying to be a better writer. Start learning how to be a ruthless editor.
How has AI changed your learning habits? Are you still watching tutorials, or just prompting your way through? Let’s discuss.
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