Programming Tutorials Are Dead
Programming Tutorials Are DeadSep 17, 2026Rob I sell programming education. So this is not a particularly convenient opinion for me to have. Somebody will buy a programming book this week.
- ▪Programming Tutorials Are DeadSep 17, 2026Rob I sell programming education.
- ▪So this is not a particularly convenient opinion for me to have.
- ▪Somebody will buy a programming book this week.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 2,106 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Rob Race |
| Canonical URL | https://robrace.dev/blog/programming-tutorials-are-dead/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:22:10 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T20:10:28.057Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T20:10:28.057Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | X1vEYrH6FymK · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Programming Tutorials Are DeadSep 17, 2026Rob 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. The revenue is already trying to tell us somethingSection titled “The revenue is already trying to tell us something” I have sold developer books and other educational products for years.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Rob Race.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Rob Race
