Graham Dumpleton: Hands-on learning in the age of AI

The useful part

At PyCon AU 2026 I gave a talk in the DevRel track titled "Hands-on learning in the age of AI", with the subtitle "Are developer workshops still relevant?". What follows is the main points I was trying to make, along with something the talk didn't cover. That something is that a couple of weeks or so after giving the talk, I released 24 free workshops for wrapture which anyone can run in their browser.

How it works

• For most of the time I have worked on mod_wsgi and wrapt, the bulk of my effort didn't go into writing code.
• Before making any case for workshops, I wanted to be straight about the things AI simply does better than we do, because some of us are still putting effort into content where our time would be better spent...
• The video is now up on YouTube if you want to watch it.
• I don't think the two are in conflict in this case, but it takes some explaining, so I will get to it at the end.
• It went into answering the same questions over and over on mailing lists, Stack Overflow and GitHub issues.

What to take from it

Every one of those now gets answered in seconds by an AI, and a lot of the answers it gives are probably mine, since it has read everything I ever wrote. The loss of that contact with the people using what you build is a separate topic though, and not what the talk was about. The tutorial that walks you through configuring something, the getting-started guide, the blog post that takes you through a setup step by step.

Details worth keeping

I touched on it in Developer Advocacy in 2026. I don't think we should be writing those any more. An AI will give you the version for the rel...