Warning: Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media now wants every human programmer to be replaced by Gen AI. Tim O'Reilly/company policy on book editing and writing went from "avoid Gen AI" to "you must use Gen AI as much as possible, we will monitor you through KPIs to use it as much as possible. So avoid O'Reilly books. Support an indie author. Plenty of them out there who write and sell books. No need to support corporate overlords. Source https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kimr4a/warning_tim_oreilly_of_oreilly_media_now_wants/ #ai

@nixCraft Weird decision to frame such a warning based on a single individual's opinion. There are a lot of dissenting voices in that reddit discussion. I find your post sloppy at best, irresponsible at worst. Otherwise, I'm generally enjoying your posts.

@nixCraft I, for one, liked O'Reilly books, esp. their (endangered) animal depictions.

What are good alternative (indie) sources?

@tizmic @nixCraft O'Reilly books were always the best marketed, but rarely the best. Even without AI, their editing was very poor. I read several and they were full of errors.

My first four books were published by Pearson and their editors caught a lot of the things that made it into the final editions of O'Reilly books. The main reasons that they were popular seemed to be:

• They were cheap (because they cut corners everywhere).
• They attended all of the conferences and got a load of visibility.

These days, it's incredibly easy to self publish. I took advice from @mwl on my most recent book, used a copyeditor that he recommended (she did an amazing job) and used draft2digital for publishing. They coordinate with a number of print-on-demand places so they can be printed near where people order them and also put the eBook versions in a load of eBook stores.

Authors can get a much larger cut of the royalties with them (you can choose how much you sell for, I mostly want to get people to read the book rather than make money on this one, so I've set it so that we get almost nothing).

@david_chisnall @nixCraft @mwl I was recently reading Jon Bodner's "Learning Go" and it seemed hardly riddled with any errors. In fact, I thought it being a very positive piece of learning good.

Besides, aren't those books selling for 40€ and upwards? Is that considered cheap?

I am aware of Pearson books, but those are also selling for about 50€, I think. The only book over 100€ I can think of in my library would be Jonathan Pevsner's "Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics".

@nixCraft
Who will buy the books if there are no programmers?

@nixCraft Look, I mistrust AI and refuse the hype as much as you do, but there's nothing in that link that proves your claims.

No mention of a change in policy, or monitoring, or even a desire to replace humans with AI.

So unless you can provide proof, I'll treat this post as baseless fearmongering and a blatant lie, and I advise everyone else to do the same.

@nixCraft O'Reilly aside, I'm not sure if a book is still a relevant medium to share and retrieve the knowledge about computer engineering. 80% of them feels outdated as soon as they come out.

@nixCraft oh ffs. And they have some of the best learning material too. I built my career on a Head First book.

@nixcraft o'really?

@tizmic @david_chisnall @nixCraft @mwl Pearson is responsible for most SAT testing.

@canleaf @tizmic @nixCraft @mwl

They’re a massive company. They bought Apple’s educational software division a while ago and own four or five publishing brands.

@david_chisnall @tizmic @nixCraft @mwl They proctor most tech cert tests

Go to the primary source and you'll see he is writing the precise opposite of what you're claiming. I mean, there's nuance here, but not as to your claim.
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it/
@nixCraft

@nixCraft Manning and NoStarch became the best publishers in the industry precisely because people have been sick for decades of working with Tim O'Reilly. Ask anyone who wrote a perl book.

@nixCraft is "number of hallucinations" a KPI?
Made-up references?

@nixCraft
if this is true, it is very sad. I used to love oreilly books. I have stacks of them. I would almost buy any technical book from them without much pre-thought.

#enshittification is spreading at an alarming rate.

See
https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1468-1df6-7d6a-5c8986252461 for the future.

@nixCraft Packt used to write books with AI in 2019 already, packaged and distributed by Amazon.

@nixCraft
Oh, really?

@nixCraft This is good for me to know, and if anyone reading this knows of a nice curated list of indie-authored coding books, I'd be interested.

@tizmic @david_chisnall @nixCraft @mwl Psychologist and professor here, jumping in to stay (almost like Cato the Elder with his Carthage thing): Pearson is fucking evil. They are a massive player in all academic and psychology print/digital markets, so it's hard to totally avoid them but I do my very best.

Pearson is one of the major motivators behind Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, which pushed high-stakes standardized testing for all kids in Texas (then, when Dubya was president, in the USA) with job-threatening results for teachers, including a decades-long refusal to look at real research on the effectiveness or consequences of this (for starters). Then they made money off schools and universities, selling them the poison snake oil. Then they made money off the teachers whose jobs were now in jeopardy because of their context-ignorant policies, by selling them prep materials for their own assessment systems. Meanwhile, they own lots of scholarly journals, so they make money hand over fist renting and reselling research paid for by public funds and largely written/edited by professors as unpaid labor.

So Pearson is evil. Avoid them forever.

@guyjantic @tizmic @nixCraft @mwl

It sounds like there aren't really good options among any of the traditional publishers.

My most recent book was done on the economic model that I think textbooks should use: we got a grant to write it. This paid for my time, a copyeditor, and four technical reviewers. We can then make the book available at cost (the eBook is a free download, but we also sell it because some people think a thing is more valuable if it costs money, so they can pat $0.99 for the same file they could download from the project web site).

I wish universities would do this and band together to pay someone to write a textbook for their courses that the consortium of universities would then own and be able to pay someone (the original author if they have time and inclination, someone else if not).

A traditional publisher gives an author a few things:

• Copyediting (they mostly outsource this, so you can contract the same people directly).
• Technical reviews (if you know enough to write the book, you probably know the right people to pay to do this).
• Typesetting (I've always done this myself).
• Printing and distribution (now that print-on-demand is cheap, there's much less need for this, and for eBooks there's no need at all).
• Marketing (it's unclear to me that I've ever received any value from this for the four books I wrote with traditional publishers).
• An advance that reduces the risk of writing the book.

Of these, the advance is really the only one that they're needed for. The advances on books I've written have paid for my time and the time to recoup them is so long that they're effectively an interest-free loan that never needs repaying (they've all made enough that the advance was fully covered by royalties). If universities funded textbooks directly, this would be unnecessary.

@tizmic @david_chisnall @nixCraft

When working with O'Reilly today, the author is basically on their own. If they turn in a good book, we get a good book.

Most tech folks don't have the skill to write a good book. Apparently Bodner does.

(That skill ain't THAT hard, btw. Thirty years ago, Tim O'Reilly said that it was easier to turn a techie into a writer than a writer into a techie. I would mostly agree.)

@mwl @david_chisnall @nixCraft I also don't expect the whole catalogue be filled with best-written content. I just think there are a couple of good ones.

@nixCraft I'm sorry, but you seem to be spreading unfounded BS.

Here are O'Reilly's actual remarks, there doesn't seem to be anything remotely similar to what the reddit post desribesm.

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ai-and-programming-the-beginning-of-a-new-era/

@guyjantic @david_chisnall @nixCraft @mwl So, Pearson is evil, O'Reilly is shifting in the same direction... any recommendations on sites that push indie content? (Unrelated, besides Anna's Archive?)
Esp. on software development?

What about other publishing houses, e.g. Wiley, Cambridge Univ. Press or Packt? (Although, I suspect the latter is also part of the O'Reilly team, right?

@tizmic @guyjantic @nixCraft @mwl

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm unconvinced that there's a need for big publishers. The live drafts of my latest book are online and the preface section has links to the PDF and ePub versions. Going from that to a book that's on sale in a print edition and an eBook edition in multiple shops was very easy and draft2digital takes a much smaller cut than any publisher would.

You don't need dedicated shops that push them. The books are available in the same places as books from the big publishers.

@david_chisnall @guyjantic @tizmic @nixCraft

Grants for textbooks are the way to go.

@tizmic @guyjantic @david_chisnall @nixCraft @mwl I've read a few books published by Packt and they've been very hit or miss. I also remember someone saying they're focusing on quantity over quality, but I can't find a credible source now.

I personally really like Manning, as they always include the DRM-free ebook version for free with every physical copy, and they have an early access program where you can provide feedback while the book is still being written.

@berglerma @tizmic @guyjantic @david_chisnall @nixCraft

If a publisher has many titles and they're hit-or-miss, they are pushing quantity over quality.

A publisher focused on quality would not let so many misses through.

@tizmic @guyjantic @david_chisnall @nixCraft @mwl for computery hackery stuff @nostarch is pretty good.

@AMS @tizmic @guyjantic @david_chisnall @nixCraft @nostarch

if you're gonna go with trad pub, I do recommend No Starch.

@david_chisnall @tizmic @nixCraft @mwl This comment highlights two things for me:

1. Yeah, we probably don't need big publishers
2. We (both customers and authors) probably need some kind of better marketing/informing system

There's great stuff out there, but not enough people hear about it.

@david_chisnall @tizmic @nixCraft @mwl I wish American universities would do this as you've said. However, I'm convinced that if American universities (i.e., presidents; ours are almost all top-down authoritarian hierarchies) did this, the result would be bad for faculty/labor, bad for students, and good (money-wise) for a few upper administrators at each school.

Though I do like the idea. Maybe I'm saying US universities have very deep structural problems making an awful lot of clear, obvious, helpful solutions currently impossible.

@nixCraft

Good lord. That’s very disappointing.

@nixCraft "OP is 100% off base. It's literally the opposite of what he believes, and he's vocal about it. Just spend 5 minutes reading his recent blog article."

@nixCraft is No Starch Press under the O'Reilly media umbrella? I fell away from O'Reilly when they seemed to shift their focus to conferences and online learning at forms and Pakt publishing.

@nixCraft
Did you visit the Reddit page you are citing? Maybe the original post (which can't be accessed right now) was a bit overshot.

@nixCraft they're going to have a real hard time selling their books to AI. WTF are they thinking?

@nixCraft long ago i was set to interview with them for a production editor job, but they cancelled and said they hired someone else. Shortly after that I got the job I still have now. In retrospect it feels like i dodged a bullet.

@nixCraft Ai is absolutely great, I use it to process old lower quality photos into higher quality ones with way higher resolution. Works great for highly specialized tasks. But to rely on Ai to make highly complex tasks like code for apps and actually maintain that long term, not a chance. There is just no way it can work and be rrliable long term. Apps already get fat long term especially as they pass through several developers, there is no way Ai code won't just get impossible to maintain.

@nixCraft @isotopp What is the source for this? The reddit post links to an article by O‘Reilly which states: „Now it’s easy to draw the conclusion from a story like this that this is the end of professional programming, that AI can do it all. For me, the lesson is the complete opposite.“

@nixCraft Oh sure, I’ll ask an AI to maken random coding requests to a number of AI’s while I do my own coding…

KPI’s? You get what you measure. Always. 🤣

@nixCraft Did you bother to read the actual post? I’d still call bullshit, but not because he’s suggesting to replace engineers with AI. He’s not.

@nixCraft wut?

@nixCraft O'Reilly still publishes books? I thought they'd turned into a web site pushing overpriced technical pablum. They used to be the go-to place for tech books, but once they shuttered the publishing business I haven't really thought about them (or patronized them.)

I did see that Tim gave up control of the company to his CFO back in 2011. So with a finance person in charge, I'm not surprised they care only about the bottom line, and would use a "KPI" policy to exploit their workers.

@nixCraft thank you for this very relevant for being a librarian that selects books for IT, CompSci, and Engineering programs

@nixCraft
> The programming world was frankly getting a bit predictable for a while.

That's like saying construction is getting a bit boring when people were starting to apply engineering methods to building houses instead of holding up the roof with hope and prayers.
Boring equals professional.
Boring equals process.
What a Muppet.

#oreillybook #oreilly #AI

@nixCraft @briankrebs

That isn’t what he said at all. Might help to read the actual blog post:

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it/

@nixCraft "source: <now deleted reddit post>"

... and of course it's full of crap.

But because it nicely fits the narrative the pitchforks are already out.

@nixCraft That is a stunning betrayal of the O'Reilly legacy. They used to be the go-to place for great guides on open-source software.
I've bought a medium sized zoo from them over the years.

@nixCraft O'Rly?

@nixCraft doesn't he know that AI crawlers don't pay? Good luck with that business model

@nixCraft Note: MANY commenters on the source say the OP grossly misrepresented Tim's statement, and the post has now been moderated away.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kimr4a/comment/mrgdrmg

I'm not saying Tim is suddenly a great guy (O'Reilly Media has been going downhill for years,) just that this specific complaint is overblown.

@nixCraft fwiw, commenters on the reddit post appear to think the OP is misinterpreting statements, but the post is awaiting mod approval so I can't see what he actually wrote now?

@nixCraft why would a person who writes books for developers tell people to stop developing?

Isn't pushing for AI use going to decrease the number of books purchased

@nixCraft Well, in this case, I think I'd replace their books also with GenAI ... since Mwta's Llama we all know that copyright and IP are blocking progress ...

So why should I even care paying for their books, when I can have an AI stealing them for me?

@nixCraft @ChanceyFleet That's somewhat funny to hear from the comany whose main income is from publishing books for programmers. If all the programmers are replaced by Gen Ai, you get the rest.... :)

@nixCraft :(

@nixCraft

Can we just create an alternate AI world for billionaires where they can think they're going to Mars, exploiting workers, making a gazillion dollars?

Meanwhile we normal, mentally-less-damaged people can get back to real world problems and deal with climate change, poverty, wars, etc 👍

@david_chisnall @tizmic @guyjantic @nixCraft @mwl I spent 10x$k on having my manuscript edited and prepared for publication as a “self-published author,” and it was worth it to have a “professional” output. (Releasing next month) But I wish it were easier🙂‍↕️

@nixCraft he also bought into TESCREAL shit, didn’t he?

@nixCraft I beg to disagree, but your interpretation is the sloppiest I've seen in a while. How did you even come to this conclusion? I read the article [1] back-to-back and none of you claims have *any* substance. None, zilch, nada.

[1] T. O’Reilly, “The End of Programming as We Know It,” O’Reilly Media. Accessed: May 11, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it/

@nixCraft That's so sad, they used to have such good books.