I mass-purchased courses in 2024. Udemy sales, YouTube recommendations, Twitter threads promising “everything you need to know about X.”
Most of them are collecting dust in my bookmarks. You know what actually taught me backend development? Conversations with Claude.
The shift
Two years ago I was a pure frontend developer. React components, CSS debugging, the usual. I knew I needed to go fullstack. The old me would have bought a Node.js course, a PostgreSQL course, a DevOps course. Probably $200+ and three months of “I’ll start next weekend.”
Instead, I started asking questions.
“Explain PostgreSQL relations like I’m someone who’s only worked with frontend state management.” Instantly clear. Better than any video chapter I’ve sat through.
“What’s domain-driven design and when would I actually use it in a real project?” Not textbook theory. A conversation. Back and forth until it clicked.
“Why do I need message queues? Give me a scenario where my current approach would break.” That one taught me more in ten minutes than the first three chapters of any distributed systems course.
What courses actually were
Think about what most online courses offered. Someone collected knowledge from documentation, Stack Overflow, and blog posts. Organized it. Packaged it nicely. Charged you $49.
That was the value. Curation and structure.
LLMs do this better now. And they do it personalized to you.
When I don’t understand something, I don’t rewind a video and hear the same explanation again. I say “explain it differently.” The model adjusts. Tries a new analogy. Checks if I got it by asking me questions back.
No static course will ever do that.
The uncomfortable truth
Here’s what nobody selling courses wants you to hear: if the knowledge exists freely on the internet, packaging it is no longer a business.
Ebooks that compile information you could Google. Courses that walk through documentation you could read. “Masterclasses” that are basically structured prompts with AI-generated answers sold back to you at a markup.
All of it is losing value fast.
But not all courses are dead
Some still matter. The ones where someone shares hard-won knowledge from actual production experience. Lessons from real failures. Perspectives you genuinely can’t find in any documentation or training data.
If a course creator has done the thing — shipped it, broke it, fixed it — that expertise is irreplaceable. LLMs can’t give you someone’s war stories from deploying AI systems at scale or their gut feeling about which architectural decisions will bite you in two years.
Unique experience is the only moat left.
The real skill gap
Here’s the catch though. If you can’t learn without courses, you probably can’t learn from LLMs either.
The barrier isn’t access to knowledge. It’s knowing what to ask. Knowing when an answer sounds off. Knowing how to push deeper when you’re confused instead of nodding and moving on.
The same people who passively watch course videos will passively accept whatever the model tells them. Learning was never about the medium. It’s about how actively you engage with it.
The false sense of progress
Buying a course feels productive. Adding it to your library feels like growth. Starting chapter one feels like momentum.
It’s not. It’s procrastination dressed up as self-improvement.
Next time you’re about to drop money on a course, try this first: open Claude or ChatGPT and have a conversation about the exact topics on that course’s agenda.
Spend thirty minutes. Ask dumb questions. Go deep on the parts that confuse you.
If the LLM covers it well — you just saved yourself $49 and got a better education in the process.
If it doesn’t — now you know the course might actually be worth it.
The path that feels easier is usually wrong. Having a real conversation about what you don’t understand is harder than pressing play on a video. But that’s exactly why it works.