HOW and WHAT should you learn in 2026 (as a web dev)?

00:00:00: What and how should you learn in

00:00:03: 2026? And I think there are two

00:00:06: main trends or two main things you should

00:00:10: focus on. The first one is working with

00:00:15: AI, so taking advantage of these AI

00:00:18: And I know there are developers that just don't

00:00:22: want to because you feel like the results you get out of

00:00:26: using AI are bad code, you spend more time fixing

00:00:30: that code than, well, than you save by using AI,

00:00:34: and that is absolutely fine. And just to be very

00:00:37: clear, if you rely on AI too much, you

00:00:41: will very likely get bad results. Your

00:00:45: skills will disappear over time or

00:00:49: will definitely not improve and the code you get will maybe

00:00:53: require a lot of fixing. It's easy

00:00:57: to end up in a cycle where you keep on prompting and prompting and you feel

00:01:00: productive and then you end up in a code base that's full of spaghetti code that's

00:01:04: hard to manage, hard to reason, where you need to take a lot of time to

00:01:08: understand it and then even more time to fix it.

00:01:11: That is a real danger. I've talked about that before and

00:01:14: exists. But I'm not saying that you

00:01:18: should become a developer that does not write any

00:01:22: code anymore and that just uses AI.

00:01:25: I'm saying that you should become comfortable working

00:01:28: with AI, leveraging AI assistants.

00:01:32: So you should try to learn to effectively work with

00:01:35: Cursor, Claude Code, or whatever your favorite AI

00:01:39: assistant is. Now, what do I mean by that?

00:01:41: I mean that you should learn how to size your prompts

00:01:45: right, so how to not ask for too much, how to provide the right

00:01:49: context, to make a plan first before you even start

00:01:53: prompting. You should learn what not to prompt for.

00:01:56: You should learn which parts of the code you need to write

00:02:00: or at least where you need to start write the code yourself before you

00:02:04: then maybe hand it off to a large language model and AI

00:02:07: assistant. These are the skills you should develop

00:02:11: can be harder than it maybe sounds.

00:02:13: But the thing is, if you're not working on your own, in

00:02:17: can, of course, ignore it, but if you're not doing that,

00:02:20: if you wanna keep the job, chances are that

00:02:24: your employer will want a workforce that feels

00:02:28: confident working with AI. You will

00:02:31: need this skill here if you wanna be

00:02:35: employable. Most companies will demand

00:02:39: that. So that is something you should practice

00:02:43: to be open-minded about that because it's simply more

00:02:46: fun and you will likely get better results if

00:02:50: you approach this open-minded. And again, it's not about

00:02:54: handing off all the work to AI, it's just using it

00:02:58: for some of the work, at least, and of getting a feeling for what

00:03:02: you can use AI assistants for where you

00:03:06: maybe see, uh, some value you can get out of that.

00:03:10: That, by the way, also kind of implies, I get, that you

00:03:14: will do more code reviews. So that is kind of an

00:03:18: implication here that you will need to get better at

00:03:21: doing code reviews. You need to get better,

00:03:25: decent, at analyzing the code that may have been generated

00:03:29: by AI and about judging that code. And that is a

00:03:33: skill. And I know writing code is more fun.

00:03:36: It's the same for me, but the role you

00:03:40: have as a software developer is simply changing

00:03:44: and I don't think it will go away. It won't change to just

00:03:48: doing code reviews but doing some amount of code reviews

00:03:52: analyzing the code that has been generated by AI, that will

00:03:56: simply be important if you wanna be employable.

00:03:59: That is my strong belief there. Now, of course, as I mentioned, if that's not a

00:04:03: focus for you, you can totally ignore that or not, depending on what

00:04:07: you want to do. Now for the second point

00:04:11: here. You need to become an

00:04:15: expert generalist and of course I know that these terms

00:04:19: kind of go against each other so let me explain.

00:04:22: In a world where we have AI models that know a

00:04:26: lot of things or that are able to produce a lot of code,

00:04:30: where much of that code is only average,

00:04:34: where they make mistakes, where they introduce

00:04:38: bugs or security issues in your code, in that

00:04:42: world you wanna be an expert. You wanna be

00:04:46: better than those models. You could say

00:04:50: AI is here, I will just use AI for

00:04:53: everything, but in that case you will lose your job because

00:04:57: AI. If your skill level is the skill level of AI

00:05:01: models, nobody needs you. Let me be very honest here

00:05:05: clear. So you wanna be better than AI.

00:05:09: Now you can't be better than AI in everything.

00:05:11: You can't be a SQL expert, a JavaScript expert, frontend and

00:05:15: backend, a CSS expert, PHP. You can't be an expert in all these

00:05:19: things so pick your areas and let's be honest.

00:05:23: We did that before AI too. We became frontend

00:05:26: developers, backend developers, uh, DevOps people.

00:05:30: We had our focus areas before that too and that

00:05:34: doesn't change and that's also not fixed by the way.

00:05:36: It can evolve and change over time.

00:05:39: You're not locked in to never change your role but you

00:05:42: should pick a certain area you find interesting and that can be

00:05:46: whatever you want and then you should become an expert

00:05:50: That is a strong recommendation. The good thing is

00:05:54: you can learn with AI. Now I'll get

00:05:58: back to how to learn a little bit later but AI can

00:06:01: definitely be an accelerator including when it comes to becoming

00:06:05: an expert because of course you can use it along the way to ask

00:06:09: follow-up questions and so on because AI has all

00:06:13: that knowledge from all the training data, it has all that

00:06:17: information from all those blog articles.It's just not always

00:06:21: good at bringing that to the table when Vibe Coding, for

00:06:24: example. But it can be a good assistant, but not the only

00:06:28: source, and again, I'll get back to that when learning

00:06:32: something. So you can leverage that.

00:06:34: But what do I mean with the generalist part now?

00:06:37: Well, because AI has that very broad knowledge, it's

00:06:41: easier as a developer now than it has been a couple of years ago

00:06:45: to work on features or work with technologies you

00:06:49: don't have a lot of experience with and I'll give you an example.

00:06:52: I, for example, recently got more into doing

00:06:56: Canvas stuff, web GPU stuff, animation

00:07:00: stuff, and these have all been areas where I

00:07:03: expertise or where I didn't have it.

00:07:06: But I used AI to help me there. Now, I'm fully

00:07:10: aware that the code I get from AI will not be awesome in all

00:07:14: cases, but it will be better than what I can

00:07:17: So I can then use AI to get some

00:07:20: code or to help me work on certain features and then I

00:07:24: can dive in, do some extra research, read some

00:07:27: documentation, and build up knowledge with help

00:07:31: of AI and work on that code that was maybe generated by

00:07:35: AI and improve it. So what I'm saying is I

00:07:39: think it's a good strategy to be open to use

00:07:43: AI to dive into technologies or features you

00:07:47: historically maybe wouldn't have touched because learning them

00:07:51: would've taken too much time. Now with AI, that gets a bit

00:07:54: easier and you can get a first draft, a first code

00:07:58: draft from AI and then build up on that.

00:08:01: And that's what I mean with generalist.

00:08:03: It's easier to become somewhat capable

00:08:07: at many things wi- because of AI.

00:08:10: But again, you wanna use AI as a draft machine or as

00:08:14: an initiator and then do your homework, dive a bit deeper,

00:08:18: and combine your expertise and your capabilities

00:08:22: as a human to learn stuff with what the AI gave

00:08:26: you. And that is how you can go really deep on

00:08:30: core skills, a few core technologies, and become

00:08:34: somewhat good at many more. And I think that will be a pretty

00:08:38: good strategy also when we talk about employability, but not

00:08:41: just when we talk about that. But instead also when we talk

00:08:45: about opportunities that are here because of AI and I talked

00:08:49: about that in my other video. You, as a developer, can

00:08:52: use your skills to build amazing stuff on top of

00:08:56: AI. Applications like my Build My Graphic

00:09:00: built to help me with generating graphics, infographics, other

00:09:03: graphics, which I then also opened up to the public.

00:09:07: Here, I combined my skills as a developer with

00:09:11: to build something that really helps me

00:09:14: know. And that is something you can do as an

00:09:18: generalist, for example, even if we leave employability aside where this

00:09:22: also help. Now, what about learning with AI though?

00:09:26: How will that look like in 2026?

00:09:29: Well, you can use AI for everything.

00:09:33: You can use just ChatGPT to learn, but that is

00:09:37: not a good strategy. I would advise against that.

00:09:41: Instead, just as with coding, use AI as

00:09:45: an assistant for learning. Use it to dive

00:09:49: deeper, to ask follow-up questions, but use it in

00:09:52: conjunction with a course, with

00:09:56: documentation, with articles, or with

00:10:00: books or whatever floats your boat.

00:10:02: And I know I'm selling courses, so I have a strong interest here, but it

00:10:06: is that combination of

00:10:09: human-curated knowledge bases and

00:10:13: learning resources where you get a clear guidance, where you

00:10:17: get expert insights. It is that combination of

00:10:21: that with the personalized

00:10:25: touch AI can give you. You can go through a

00:10:29: course, for example, like my courses, and there will be parts where you

00:10:33: maybe struggle. Other students struggle with other

00:10:37: parts, so there will always be parts in a course

00:10:41: harder to grasp for you. Guess what?

00:10:43: You can go to AI, ChatGPT or whatever, and ask for

00:10:47: further explanations or for examples or for maybe

00:10:51: a coding exercise you can do. And by the way, I'm working on

00:10:55: some pretty interesting stuff here to kind of

00:10:59: bring that together so that you don't have to switch platforms.

00:11:01: But I'll share more once I have more to share.

00:11:04: Uh, you can, of course, sign up to my newsletters below to be the

00:11:07: but that is something where you can get the

00:11:11: best of both worlds. And that is how I would learn and how I do

00:11:15: learn. If I'm learning TanStack Start, for example, which I learned

00:11:19: last year, I did that with their official docs,

00:11:23: by reading some articles, by watching some YouTube videos, and

00:11:27: then I used AI to ask follow-up

00:11:30: questions. Especially also AI where I provided the

00:11:34: docs as extra sources, I just put that

00:11:38: into the AI chat, to then chat about that and

00:11:42: then get the best out of both worlds.

00:11:45: And that is how I would learn w- and how I will learn in

00:11:48: 2026, and how I would recommend to learn in

00:11:52: And again, I'm working on more stuff here to make

00:11:56: easier and I'm super excited to share more once I have more.

00:11:59: But yeah, that is therefore, uh, what

00:12:03: and how to learn in 2026.

00:12:06: And as always, let me know what you think of that.

00:12:09: And again, I got more exciting stuff to share,

00:12:13: forward to.