The elephant in the room • Josh W. Comeau

The elephant in the room<br>FromJosh W. ComeauReply-Tome@joshwcomeau.comSentApril 29, 2026<br>This issue of my newsletter was sent to newsletter subscribers.<br>Sign up to receive future issues!

Hi there!

I want to talk a bit about AI and the related shifts in the tech industry. I know this is top-of-mind for lots of y’all, and you might be wondering if it even makes sense to learn new programming skills in this environment.

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: AI models have become shockingly good at completing a wide variety of programming tasks. They’re certainly not perfect, but in many cases, they’re good enough. I’m not happy about this, for a wide variety of ethical/environmental/safety reasons, but it is what it is.

In this email, I want to zoom into one specific thing: I think people are jumping to the wrong conclusion about what AI means for their careers.

Alright, so the biggest concern I’ve seen from my fellow developers is that human developers won’t be necessary in the near future, since LLMs?Large Language Models will be able to fully design and build projects of all sizes and scales. And, well, I just haven’t seen any evidence of that. 😅

In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. The biggest AI success stories I’ve seen have been from people who are highly technical, folks with deep subject matter expertise.

For example, Matt Perry recently shared in his newsletter that he was leaning into AI in 2026. Matt is the author of several animation libraries including Popmotion, Motion One, and Motion (formerly Framer Motion). There aren’t many people on this planet who know as much about animations on a technical level. The layout projection engine he created for Motion is one of the most sophisticated pieces of engineering I’ve ever seen.

In his email, Matt explains that he set a goal of closing 60 issues in Q1, and wound up closing 160. He wanted to do a major refactor of Motion in Q2, and got it done in a single January afternoon! AI has significantly boosted his productivity.

This is remarkable, and you might think that this is evidence that LLMs are even better than the best human developers… but that implies that everyone is having the same success with AI tooling as Matt. And that’s just not true.

Every now and then, I pop into the /r/vibecoding subreddit, a place where people (mostly with little to no dev experience) share their experiences with vibe-coding, and there are countless stories like this:

Without guidance, LLMs tend to paint themselves into a corner, because they’re generating code to solve individual prompts, not thinking holistically about an application’s architecture.

So, on the one hand, I’m seeing the most talented developers I know amplify what they can do with AI, and on the other, I’m seeing people with less domain knowledge struggle to get past the “MVP” stage.

AI is a tool, and tools need to be wielded proficiently. You could give me Jimi Hendrix’s exact guitar but it would sound very different if I tried to play it! I also wouldn’t be able to cook like Gordon Ramsey if I had access to his kitchen, or serve like Serena Williams if you handed me her tennis racket.

We tend to overweight the importance of tools, and I think this is a nearly-universal human bias. Marketing teams routinely take advantage of this, selling us Michael Jordan’s sneakers with “air technology” as if that’ll suddenly grant us the ability to dunk. 😅

I think it’s harder for us to see AI agents as tools because we’ve anthropomorphized them. If my basketball started telling me what a great basketball player I am, I might be less inclined to see it as a tool as well!

When we treat LLMs like little autonomous robots, we start to give them more credit than they deserve, and it starts to feel plausible that they could one day replace us. But that’s not the right mental model. I think AI tools are more like Iron Man’s suit. It can do incredible things, but not on its own.

Similarly, if Matt Perry handed me the keys to the Motion repository and told me to take over, I wouldn’t have the same results even though I have access to the same set of LLM tools. If I tried to move at the same cadence, I’d wind up making a huge mess of things. 😂

So, this is the big mistake I think people are making. We look at what a skilled developer can do with an LLM and credit the LLM rather than the skilled developer. My experience suggests that AI has a multiplying effect on our existing technical skills, so the more we understand web development, the more effective we’ll be with AI.

Link to this headingWhimsical Animations

On Monday, I launched my brand-new course, Whimsical Animations(opens in new tab). ✨

I’ve been building websites and web applications for nearly 20 years now, and in that time, I’ve learned a lot about how to craft memorable, impactful animations and interactions. It’s my favourite part of web development, and I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting and...