Maximilian Schwarzmüller

Udemy is getting acquired (by Coursera) & the Udemy brand will disappear.

I've created & shared my first Udemy course almost ten years ago.

And to this day, that "Angular - The Complete Guide" course (which - like many other courses - got updated many, many times by me) is one of my bestselling courses.

I can't tell what this acquisition by Coursera means for my future as a Udemy instructor. Time will tell.
I will definitely keep on teaching - on one platform or another.

But learning that a brand that was THE main part of my professional life for the last 10 years will go away is really very, very sad.

This is a different post. It's very personal and important to me.

10 years ago, I changed my life - without fully being aware of it back then. Because on October 19th 2015, I registered my first company - still in Berlin at the time (I eventually moved to Munich in 2017).

The photo attached to this post shows my original registration form (unfortunately only in German - sorry about that).

I started this company because I wasn't satisfied with "just doing my normal job". I wanted to try something, risk something.
But most of all, I wanted to write code & help others to learn how to code. Because as a 100% self-taught developer, I knew (and still know) the struggles of learning and mastering coding.

I started my journey to becoming a developer when I was 12 or 13 years old. Just by reading books and trying things out - we didn't even have an internet connection at that time in my home.
I've been coding since then - but always just as a hobby, (almost) never as a job - apart from a few holiday or side jobs. Instead, I studied business administration and started working in banks and consultancies.

But that changed in 2015 when I finally decided to follow my passion and work as a developer and teacher.

If you're able to read German (or use ChatGPT for translation), you can see that my original business registration form contains a pretty lengthy business purpose that mostly was about freelancing. Because I never would’ve dreamed that teaching could actually sustain me and provide a reliable income.

That's why I feel blessed that through lots of hard work, dedication, more support than I could've ever hoped for by my spouse, family and friends, and - of course - also luck, I was (and still am) able to work fulltime as a teacher and developer and make a very decent living off that.

So, looking back at the last 10 years, I'm incredibly thankful for those amazing years and how my life changed over that times pan.
And now with AI (and life in general) providing plenty of new challenges and uncertainties, I'm excited to see what the future holds.

I'm not going anywhere, I'll continue teaching, writing code and all the other things I enjoy, and I hope I'll be able to write a similar post after 20 years.

If you stuck along all the way to the end of this post, that's amazing! If you took one of my courses, watched some of my YouTube videos, read one of my articles or my book, or simply follow me here on LinkedIn, please know that it truly means the world to me!

Thank you so very much - you're all amazing!

Naturally, as a developer, what do I do when I need a new professional photo of myself?

Buy a new shirt?

Use an existing AI service that requires 10 photos of myself to train a custom model?

Or use ChatGPT and hope for the best?

Of course not! I build my own business headshots AI service.

It's good. It's fast. And it's affordable (no subscription).

Give it a try if you don't want to build your own one! :-)

I just launched a new course! 🚀 🎉

👉 AI Agents & Workflows - The Practical Guide

And, yes, I know: "AI Agents" is an extremely hyped up term. And most people actually just mean "stuff that uses AI" when they say "AI Agents".

But: You can build genuinely useful workflows & agents that utilize AI (LLMs) to solve common problems, provide useful automations and save you time.

And that's exactly why I created a course on that!

It'll give you the solid foundation and the key concepts you need to know to build your own AI-powered workflows and agents.

You'll learn how to programmatically (with Python) build workflows that combine steps and tools that use LLMs to generate content, make decisions, perform research and much more.

This course will walk you through the theory you need (e.g., "Workflows vs Agents", "Agent Memory: Short-term & Long-term", "Managing Control Flow") and provide plenty of concrete examples to ensure that you're able to build actually useful AI workflows & agents.

So looks like Amazon is running a neat promotion for my "React Key Concepts" (second edition) book! 🎉

If you don't have it already, and if you're interested in a React deep dive (including RSCs, Next.js & more!), you find a link in the comments! :-)

Vibe coding 🤪
Agentic engineering 🤝

Today. Will you join me?

Yesterday, OpenAI announced "ChatGPT Agent" - a new capability (not available in the EU yet) that allows ChatGPT to perform actions with help of a virtual computer. Like browsing the web (including interacting with websites), work on spreadsheets etc.

Even though it's still limited and in early stages, it's an impressive piece of technology.
But it's not all gloomy...

The Good
In theory, ChatGPT Agent will allow you to outsource all kinds of tedious tasks.
OpenAI showed a demo where the agent would buy clothes and a gift for a wedding. But obviously, the idea is that you can do more meaningful, helpful things with it.

The Bad
Right now, it's still limited. It's slow, it may get stuck, it may not be able to do what you want it to do.
The results it produces may not have the quality you need. More manual refinement might be needed. Or you might need to redo it from scratch.
But that's not the worst thing about it...

The Ugly
I see at least two BIG PROBLEMS:

1) Security: Prompt injection becomes a HUGE issue if you outsource complex tasks to AI agents that have access to a broad variety of tools.
Bad actors may trick the agent into doing things you don't want it to do. Especially if you give the agent access to protected resources (e.g., bank account) it doesn't take a lot of fantasy to imagine what could happen.

2) The web as we know it may be dead:
Even if 1) can be tamed with proper controls, barriers etc, there's another big problem => We're more and more working with a web that's populated with content by machines for machines.
Already, lots of content gets consumed through ChatGPT, AI summaries etc.
With more capable AI agents that will likely accelerate.
The same is true for producing content. AI already produces lots of posts (not this one, by the way) and blog posts.
I'm not 100% sure if that's the future we need.

But it's coming anyways, and AI obviously has many advantages and helpful use-cases, too.
Still, many challenges await!

Finally another livestream! Can't wait to start in a few hours!

Will you join me? 😃

Today I woke up to the news of Meta laying off 600 employees from their AI division. Only a few weeks after going on a hiring spree (with signing bonuses up to $100m) for AI top talent.

Is that the end of the AI hype?

Well, at first glance, it might look like the AI bubble is bursting. But the reality is the opposite: Meta is doubling down on AI.

The cuts are part of a radical restructuring that consolidates power under new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang and his elite “TBD Lab”, focused solely on building Meta’s next-generation superintelligence model.

Meta seems to primarily be laying off members of the "old" FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team to focus on "top talent", remove friction and overlapping responsibilities, and focus on thew new TBD Lab.

So, no, it's not the end of the AI hype - instead Meta seems to be doubling down on their new hires and strategy.

My Look Back At 2025 (as a web developer)

In theory, this was supposed to be “the year of AI agents.”

But in reality, that only happened because everything that included AI was labeled an agent.
Built a program that reads PDF files and summarizes them via AI? Congratulations, you got an AI agent.

So ... yeah ... it wasn't really the year of AI agents I'd say.

BUT one area where AI & AI tooling DID improve was coding assistants. Cursor got better, Claude Code was released - writing code with AI assistance (not to be confused with vibe coding, which I'm not a fan of) is on another level than it was a year ago. And that trend will continue, I think.

Tools that help scaffold code, refactor, or explore APIs quietly became part of many dev workflows. And many companies are expecting their developers to leverage those AI assistants.

However, when you lean too heavily on AI without knowing what you’re doing, you risk trading expertise for “vibe coding” - a term that was coined by Andrej Karpathy in 2025.
But "going with the flow" and "not really caring about the code" might work for quick prototypes, experiments or one-off programs.
For real-world projects? You still need solid fundamentals, thoughtful architecture, and a critical mindset.
I think 2025 showed us that, as developers, we can get a lot out of AI by leveraging our skills and combining them with the breadth of the "knowledge" of those LLMs and the speed at which they can spit out code.

Besides AI (where I could share more - see the graphic attached to this post), we saw a web ecosystem which experienced various attacks on npm packages and vulnerabilities related to React.
Which is especially a problem since React.js belongs to the "default stack" AI loves to use: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Tailwind.

There's nothing wrong with that stack, but I'm concerned about a lack of innovation that may result from such a default stack. We're not seeing that yet, I think (and we do indeed have strong "newcomers" like better-auth in 2025) but it is something I worry about.

I think 2026 will be an exciting year. I'm hopeful that the dev job market will improve, that we can leverage AI to build useful stuff AND that we can work with exciting technologies & libraries, including "new" ones like, for example, TanStack Start (an amazing alternative to Next.js).

Back with another livestream today (in ~1.5 hours).

Upon popular request, we'll work on an actual (side) project I'm currently playing around with.

Going to add authentication with Better Auth and payments with Polar.

Only got 90 minutes, so let's see how far we get 💪

I'll continue building the AI captioning web app from last week - should be fun again!
You can also join if you missed last week, no worries. 😃