I'm pleased to present, for free, the first hour of my new course Understanding AI-Assisted Software Development on YouTube! This course is designed to be agnostic to any one AI tool, and instead provide a mental model and best practices for you and your team. 👇

Getting good maintainable results from LLM code generation isn't a single dev's endeavor. It's a team activity. Why? Remember one key fact: an LLM feeds on its own output. Whatever an LLM outputs becomes part of its context. Output becomes input. (1/5)

I find it more useful to think of TypeScript, not as a programming language, but as a form of active documentation for your JavaScript.

A YouTube commenter on my most recent video asked if I've considered that I'm actually a philosopher. So now I want to add "Software Philosopher" to my tagline.

There is critical vulnerability in React Server Components disclosed as CVE-2025-55182 that impacts React 19 and frameworks that use it. A fix has been published in React versions 19.0.1, 19.1.2, and 19.2.1. We recommend upgrading immediately. react.dev/blog/2025/12...

I'm honored to have been featured in @pluralsight.bsky.social 2026 Tech Forecast. On page 18 of the forecast I comment on what I think is one of the biggest dangers facing devs today: LLM over-reliance and skill atrophy. What's your no-hype take on what 2026 will look like for devs?

Reminder: Today is the last day of the Black Friday sale on my new site, with new courses and coaching sessions on sale. dontimitate.dev

All my courses and live coaching are on sale for Black Friday on my new site! If you believe in the Don't Imitate Understand motto, a repost is much appreciated! dontimitate.dev

I’m moving away from Udemy and that’s a very big deal for me. New courses, live coaching, a subscription option, and a brand new site with everything on sale for Black Friday. Hope to see you there. dontimitate.dev

All these kids upset about the Stranger Things release schedule. Ha. Try being a kid in the 90s waiting all summer to find out what happened after Captain Picard was assimilated by the Borg.

Whoa my little new blog post from today just hit the front page of Hacker News! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4606...

Social media has become a reminder of something precious we're losing in the age of LLMs: 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲 𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀. Over time, it's become obvious just how many posts are being generated by an LLM. The tell is the voice. 👇🧵

You deserve a coach, but most devs have never had a coach or mentor. I have live coaching session slots available for December, and sessions are on sale right now for Black Friday. What do you want help with? 👇

If your process is bad, AI will make it worse, faster. In the latest DIU podcast episode, I talk 7 specific pitfalls to avoid and how your dev team can get real wins from AI-assisted dev! 👇

The first hour of my new course "Understanding Modern JavaScript Frameworks" is now free on YouTube! A unique course that dives into the core concepts that JS frameworks share, so that you can confidently work with any framework, now or in the future. 👇

I'm extremely excited to announce a new home for all my courses, coaching, workshops, and more! Black Friday is on by the way, including early access to my new AI course, content for which is being dropped this week. Check out the new site, built in @astrodotbuild! 👇

The second episode of my new Don't Imitate Understand podcast is out! In it we talk about an important skill that leads and devs should have: the ability to be Abstraction Breakers. Web dev is an ecosystem of leaky abstractions. Good architecture means understanding them. 👇

You get new things from an LLM. You just never get anything novel. There's a difference.

There's a big difference between junior devs and AI. Junior devs learn.

Don't get fooled by Agentic hype. It's just LLMs in a loop, maybe with tools. Useful, but still the same unreliable LLMs under-the-hood. Plus, with every loop iteration you compound probabilities that the LLM goes off the rails. Agent with care.

There are endless tutorials on how to start coding, but almost none on what comes after. How to lead, communicate, interview for architect roles, or organize teams around LLMs. That’s what I’m building with All-Access Mentorship and Live Coaching for experienced devs.

(1/10) Big Announcement! I'm incredibly excited to announce a new way to learn with me and fight skill atrophy in the age of AI. Introducing All Access Mentorship. It's a way to save money on courses from me, connect live every month, plus lots of other perks: 👇

Current status: Recording my new course on AI-assisted development. Tool agnostic, we derive best practices from first principles and talk how to integrate LLM-generated code into professional software dev lifecycles.

Task decomposition has long been a marked skill of any good software architect or designer. That's no different in the age of LLM-generated code.

Studying React Server Components in depth for a paper, and as with all things, there is fascinating stuff there when you dive deeper. Some great resources: Server Component RFC: github.com/reactjs/rfcs... Understanding React Server Components by @tonyalicea.dev: tonyalicea.dev/blog/underst...

Been working on the ePub version of my Normal UI book. If you buy the PDF book now you'll get the ePub later. Companion video course is on sale. tonyalicea.dev/normalui/

The response to my offer of live coaching has been shocking and touching. I wrote a bit about it: tonyalicea.dev/blog/coaching/

In the age of AI, we need a replacement for Agile. Here's my pitch for one. tonyalicea.dev/blog/cascade...

Huge positive news for the React community. React and React Native are moving out of Meta and into Linux Foundation. engineering.fb.com/2025/10/07/o...

(1/3) In the age of AI, it's personal connection that will be the differentiator. Connection with your users, your stakeholders, your teammates, your instructors, your bosses, your employees. 🧵

Cascade Methodology is a replacement for Agile in the age of AI. I’m excited to say there is now an official GitHub repo to discuss and ask questions, and where I’ll be working on a book out in the open. If the methodology interests you, starring the repo is much appreciated! 👇

1/4 LLMs have changed software development. They can generate features in minutes that once took days, and large amounts of code that's subtly wrong. Our development methodologies need to catch up. 🧵

The prototype a PM produces with an LLM is communication, not design. Much goes into good UX: workflow design, HCI principles, usability heuristics. Don’t skip these skills just because something looks done. Don’t put your UX designer back into “just make it pretty” fail mode.

There are two kinds of 80s/90s kids. Those who think Beakman is better than Bill Nye, and those who think Bill Nye is better than Beakman. I'm in the Beakman camp. I cannot be swayed from this position.

With LLMs, there is even more reason for a web UX designer to learn HTML and CSS. You will basically have superpowers for user research, iteration, and design artifact generation.

So making AI features has us back to doing lots of string building like the old days. Anyone miss Perl?

LLMs won't replace skilled engineers. But as organizations shortsightedly replace junior devs, LLMs may make it harder to find new skilled engineers in the future.

I'm sorry but all these 10x agentic coding stories of a single dev getting a ton of code pushed...reviewing code *takes time* (tests or no tests). Performance, logic, edge cases, etc. all need human eyes at some point. 10x technical debt is not the flex you think it is.

The must-have skill for getting the best output from AI has actually been around for a long time. It's called "information architecture". Good context/prompt engineering is just information architecture for language models.

I think 'context engineering' and 'prompt engineering' set poor mental models for doing it well. A better term, for a number of reasons, would be 'context authoring'. I feel like writing a blog post on this.

Change happens. New tools appear. AI is the latest (huge) example of that. As change blows through, I believe that fundamental understanding is an anchor. The safest most assured way to have a long, enjoyable dev career. That's why I teach what I teach the way I teach it.

I have multiple courses in production…but work has begun on my first AI course (the first of a few). It will be a fundamentals course on effectively using Generative AI for software development, starting from first principles of how AI works. Stay tuned.

Web devs: What do you want to learn right now? AI is all the rage. Fundamentals are more important than ever (you need to understand generated code). LLMs aren’t great a new things either and new tools and frameworks continue to arrive. So…what do you want to learn right now?

The State of CSS survey is live! Please take a moment to fill it out 🙂 It really helps us make more informed decisions on how to focus our web platform (CSS & UI) engineering and DevRel efforts! survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey...

Uh-oh Claude is down. I guess that now means all software development stops.

1/6 📚 Something I'm excited to share: I'm now offering special group and community rates for my "Understanding React" course to student cohorts, bootcamps, learning groups, and community organizations.

So...we're basically deciding that "cliff notes" is the preferred way to consume all information? And the reason we need summaries is because we have no time because social media + devices is pro-actively taking it? Do I have that right?

To rely on the calculations of a non-deterministic machine for anything financial is insane.

Big news - @udemy's new Role Play feature just dropped! I've added 7 investigative scenarios with AI stakeholders to my new course on building the right software. Can you talk to them and uncover the real problems? Master an AI-proof skill --- by using AI! On sale for 5 days.👇

There's a surprise course coming in-between the courses I've announced for pre-sale. It's one I've mentioned before though. That's all I'm saying for now, but I'm really enjoying recording it.