A certain sadness about the disparition of tutorials

I have, like many programmers, read a tremendous amount of tutorials to learn how other were implementing various solutions. I have even started this blog to write my own tutorials to help others and "give back to the community".

But I have noticed this year that the number of tutorials related to programing has fallen sharply. Whenever I google a technical question and skip the AI generated answer, I see only "old" tutorials, meaning, pre-2026. The rare 2026 posts I have found are actually AI generated ones with this hideous way to explain things that makes them noticeable instantly. An illustration of this phenomenon being the Stack overflow number of questions going from something like 200k/month in 2020 to less than 1k/month now.

And to be honest, it makes me sad, without me knowing specifically why. I don't want to be a doomer, but I cannot help to miss the old tutorials, the same way I prefered phpBB forums to Discord channels.

It makes me sad not because I love particularly tutorials. I've always thought plenty of them were just copy/pasting of one another, hence useless.

But maybe because I add more trust to the tutorial of someone who wrote her name on it. "This person must have implemented her solution and be sure to publish under her name".

Or maybe because the tone, the writing, is always different, which feels fresher to read?

Anyway, I do use AI to learn how to implement things too now. But I always wonder if it is giving me the best way of doing things. And if no one is telling how they are doing things anymore, how can we expand our horizon?

This is even more scary than yesterday the AI gave me a way to implement something, and when I clicked on the link to the blog post it was taking the information from, I saw an AI generated tutorial with this hideous writing style... AI is looping on itself now.