Helping the smartest people in the world thrive in the Age of AI. Humans will never be abstracted.
Greater Orlando
65K followers
500+ connections
65K followers
500+ connections
About
Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with a focus on AI enabled development, agentic workflows, and practical engineering skills. Author of more than 130 courses across the LinkedIn Learning catalog lifecycle, including a growing set of AI titles that have reached millions of learners. Current active courses span AI prompting, agentic coding, Cursor 2 development, GitHub tooling, and full stack JavaScript, supported by several popular series such as Vibe Code This, Prompting with Agentic Techniques, and Build with AI.
Teaching emphasizes clear, repeatable workflows and real projects that help developers work with modern AI systems and production tooling. Courses consistently attract strong engagement from enterprise teams adopting AI assisted development patterns, while long standing GitHub and JavaScript titles continue to support foundational skills.
Experience includes building production grade demos, writing instructional content, and delivering technical talks for developer conferences and university programs. Background combines full stack engineering, multimedia development, and more than a decade of curriculum design for AI and software education.
Core Competencies
- AI augmented development and agentic workflows
- Full stack engineering in JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python
- Technical instruction, communication, and developer education
- Video based teaching, scenario driven courses, and hands on builds
- Community engagement as a LinkedIn top poster
- Curriculum design for AI, software engineering, and modern tooling
- Collaboration with engineering teams through structured feedback and prototyping
Courses by Ray
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Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End1h 3m
Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End
By: Ray Villalobos
Articles by Ray
Activity
65K followers
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Ray Villalobos shared thisIt's pretty clear to me that the future of AI isn't what the hype train says it is. The conversation keeps focusing on job replacement, which people are either too excited about or deeply worried about. The social media platforms are serving it up en masse. Everyone wants to know "When will AI take my job?" I've spent billions of tokens automating a ton of work. AI has already enhanced everything I do, and you know what? I'm not worried about getting automated. The AIs should be worried about me, not the other way around. First, you should be asking Which skills should I hand over to AI, and which ones become more valuable? What AIs Do Better Humans doing research? data analysis? hand coding? Those days are numbered. AI can process thousands of variables in seconds and surface insights that would take humans days or weeks to uncover. What Humans Do Better Interpreting that data? Making decisions based on context, experience, and intuition? Understanding what the data means for your specific situation? AI's can give you a billion lame or wrong options (and I have the billions of spent tokens to prove it). They have a hard time deciding whether those options are any good. They keep quitting, giving you mediocre results and confidently telling you that they've finished something they didn't do. It's not getting better. Right now, the hottest skill isn't prompting, is being able to evaluate and direct the work that AIs perform, figuring out systems that automate jobs and build processes that controls the pipelines. Think of data analysis, that job was never about knowing which SQL commands to run or how to structure a database query. It's always been about extracting the right signals to make decisions. It's knowing which questions to ask, understanding business context, recognizing which patterns matter for your specific situation. If you thought it was about the SQL, you've been misled. AI can generate infinite dashboards and correlations. Without human judgment on what matters, you get technically accurate but marginally useful outputs. Some people truly believe that there's a world where computers just take over and we do nothing. Sigh. That's not going to age well, It's wrong and honestly...completely insane. The future belongs to people who can: - Frame the right questions - Interpret AI outputs through a human lens - Make decisions with incomplete information - Understand purpose and business context AI just made that more obvious. So don't be the person that is scared of being replaced by AI, be the person AI should be scared about. Because you know how to keep it so busy, it won't have time to think about taking over the world. Go get it!
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Ray Villalobos shared thisYou know what series I love working on at LinkedIn Learning? AI Trends Close to 10k bookmarks, almost 200k learners. It's basically 🔥 for your AI learning, but it's more than that. The G.O.A.T. of AI Learning I want to break down why I think the series has resonated so well and my personal approach to how I prepare content (My editorial voice). This is my north star for I think about teaching, but also the filter that I apply on AI Trends. Would love to know what you think. - Respect your time. You're smart and busy. If you're like me, you can't stand fluff, keep things short, and add depth only when the topic earns it. No long intros. Frame the problem, show the solution. - Filter ruthlessly. There's a lot of hype and doomerism out there. Cut through both. Don't care if something is suspiciously trending everywhere . If it doesn't meet our bar, it doesn't get covered. - Every demo is real and relatable. No superficial walkthroughs we take our time and are serious about helping you learn. We work with these tools daily. Real files, real workflows. Sorry, no snake game demos (who plays those anyway). - No sponsors, no algorithm chasing. Nobody's selling you headphones or land in the middle of a video. - Every video goes up because the topic is important or exciting, or it doesn't go up. We have the freedom to cover things honestly, and we use it. - We assume you are like us and love this stuff. You think the future is bright and you want to be part of it. So do we. Join us...you can learn it...Let's do this!
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Ray Villalobos shared thisHey boomer, the 90s called. They want their chat back. Remember those good ole days when using AI meant having a conversation? You'd open ChatGPT, type a prompt, wait for a response, refine, repeat. Oh yeah, that was last week. Sorry to tell ya...that glorious future is already history...and honestly it was a bit boring. With Claude Cowork's new Dispatch and Scheduled Tasks features and things like OpenClaw, we've officially broken the time-and-space barrier. Your AI agent doesn't wait for you to chat anymore or be sitting at your office. It works while you sleep, eat...whatever. It's wild: You can now send a task to Claude from Telegram, WhatsApp, or Discord while you're at the pool, walking your dog, riding llamas in Peru (not that you'd be doing any of that during work hours). Then, you come back to finished work. A research report. Code reviewed. A spreadsheet updated. The agent connects to your Google Drive, AWS, Azure, or even your local hard drive. It runs on a schedule you set. Morning briefings. Weekly reports. Status updates. Think delegating, not chatting. I've got this whole content pipeline thing set up. My bot Otis reads all my newsletters, then updates an Obsidian Kanban board for me with top 5 content priorities. I ask it to draft a post and, then I jump into Claude Cowork to draft the script for a course. This nothing like I was working just a few weeks ago. Poor Otis never clocks out and neither does Cowork. It just works between your instructions. Posting, drafting scripts, analyzing performance? Those aren't things I do, they're things I hand off to my agents. Your phone is now a remote control for your computer's brain. The chat era is over. The dispatch era is here.
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Ray Villalobos shared thisKarpathy says developers have a high chance of getting replaced and that perhaps manual laborers are safer. His new tool scores, the Job Market Visualizer looks at 342 jobs by "AI exposure" on a 0-10 scale. Software developers? 9/10. Very high exposure. Roofers? 0-1/10. Minimal exposure. The conclusion is obvious: developers, writers, analysts... potentially cooked. Better learn a trade. I can't with geniuses sometimes. I am no giant and Andrej is one of those gems of people who drive the direction of the industry, but here's the thing: genius-level minds miss the details. Back in the 1950s, milkmen made daily rounds because refrigeration was rare and stores closed early. By the early 1970s, home delivery was essentially gone. Not because people stopped drinking milk. Supermarkets and refrigeration changed everything. The explosion of technology with consumer demand created an entirely new industry. Today, the US delivery market is worth over $200 billion annually. Amazon alone delivers over 9 billion items via same-day or next-day delivery every year. Same-day delivery alone is a $12.2 billion market in 2024. The jobs didn't disappear. They transformed into something bigger. The tool itself even notes it's "not a report, a paper, or a serious economic publication", just a way to explore some BLS data visually. Yet people are treating LLM-scored coloring of current occupations as a prediction of the future. Here's the part that really gets me about this discussion: the cost argument. I'm spending a fortune on API tokens right now. Claude Opus at $25 per million tokens, Gemini Pro at $200/month. These companies are burning billions in compute costs. Yet I'm supposed to believe it'll all be free someday? How does that transition work? Who is going to be paying for those data centers in space while we make that transition. We're not going to wake up one day and...bang...free tokens for everyone. Show me that business model. If I'm not lost by this time, when it truly becomes obvious is when they start talking about Universal Basic Income. Ontario's trial lasted 15 months before cancellation. Finland scaled back. The Texas/Illinois experiment found people worked less and earned less. Man, we really tried that and it failed miserably....every time. Stop selling me the dream. Explain the transition and use common sense instead of your brains for change. Because right now, the math doesn't even add up. At least Karpathy adds some notes at the bottom of this study that bring things down to earth, but this is the type of information that social media doomers will put to bad use. Also, this was originally a tool and he removed it because of how people started using it and referring to it. It's probably not a good idea to publish these types of docs that are easily misused. I'll get off my high horse now. Would love to debate about this. Where do you see the future? Are you into the UBI? How would you solve the transition problem?
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Ray Villalobos shared thisRemember when we thought AI would look like the Terminator? Turns out we got it wrong. The machines are not coming with lasers and explosions. They are coming for our Slack messages and Jira tickets. Six weeks ago, OpenClaw was just another GitHub repo with a cool demo. Today it has 250,000+ stars and the creator just joined OpenAI. The gold rush is officially on. But here is the thing: OpenClaw is powerful, but also a security nightmare waiting to happen. Now we have an entire ecosystem of "clones" trying to fix that problem. Here are some of your current options (links in comments) - NemoClaw (Nvidia) - Enterprise wrapper with sandboxing and audit logging. Huang says every company needs an OpenClaw strategy. This is Nvidia's bet on making it enterprise-safe. - Perplexity Computer - Cloud-based with a literal kill switch. Every action tracked, every sensitive task needs sign-off. You lose local file access but gain "someone else to blame if things go wrong." - Manus My Computer - Meta's desktop app for Mac and Windows. Every command requires individual approval. Slower than full autonomy, but exactly what cautious users need. - NanoClaw - Built in a weekend by Gavriel Cohen. The pitch: OpenClaw's 500K lines are too large to audit. NanoClaw does the same in hundreds of lines, with mandatory container isolation (Docker deal signed). - ZeroClaw - 3.4MB Rust binary. Boots in 10ms on 0.6GHz cores. Uses less than 5MB RAM. Runs on a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero. Built by Harvard and MIT students. - Moltis - 150K lines of Rust, zero unsafe code blocks. Voice I/O, Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing. Enterprise observability for regulated environments. Each one attacks a different weakness of the original. - Maximum power? OpenClaw is still the default. - Security? NanoClaw has you covered. - Run it like it's 1999? Prince...ugh...I mean...ZeroClaw works on a Pi Zero. - Need enterprise blessing? NemoClaw has Nvidia's backing. Fortunately, the rise of the machines is not a dystopia. It is a toolset. It will make the people who learn to use it superhuman. The only question left: which claw do you choose?
Ray Villalobos replied to a comment
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Roy Meshulam Not just computers, but everything has to open up securely to agents. Some companies have done this smartly. I appreciate Gemini's opening up of their services through a CLI. I think MS is doing the same with WorkIQ. Those two companies can see the vision and are fearless.
Ray Villalobos replied to a comment
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Ariel Cohen 100%. The video took a bit longer to make sure I wasn't just selling the hype, OpenClaw killer, It does everything. I wanted to bring a balanced view of what it can actually do and when you'd run into friction. Also time to work on a useful and interesting example, so I'm really glad I get to do these things without having to sell Headpones to support myself. ;)
Ray Villalobos replied to a comment
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Rowan Pratt Everyone, including the C-Suite reacts to whatever incentives are in front of them, and then the market adjusts. Companies that mistake the signals and go for the large layoffs will ultimately suffer for it. Although I worry about it, in the end the wisdom of the crowds fixes a lot of mistakes.AI becomes a good excuse for something they have been wanting to do. It's easier to have a boogey man called AI to blame layoffs on.Meanwhile it's up to the individual to stay valuable, flexible and look for opportunities. If you're proactive and focus on bringing value, you'll be ahead.
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Ray Villalobos liked thisRay Villalobos liked thiswhoa... the 64,000th feature claude code is the source code 😳 someones @ anthropic JUST ACCIDENTALLY exposed the full source code in a source map on npm. DMCA takedowns are going wild, but it's too late.. it's out there. 500k+ lines of code. people have already ported it to python, and scoured the code for some interesting insights about what is about to be released ✨ Kairos — Persistent assistant mode (even more OpenClaw like). Claude remembers across sessions via daily logs, then "dreams" at night — a forked subagent consolidates your memories while you sleep. ✨ Ultraplan — Sends complex planning to a remote Claude instance for up to 30 minutes. You approve the plan in your browser, then "teleport" it back to your terminal. ✨ Mult-agent Coordinator Mode — Already accessible via CLAUDE_CODE_COORDINATOR_MODE=1. Spawns parallel worker agents that report back via XML notifications. ... and something spicy claude code has "UNDERCOVER MODE" where they have taught it not to look like an AI, and basically pretend to be a human. used whe nit contributes (anonymously) to public repos. but tbh - claude code should be open source (like codex etc) so maybe this will force their hand? 🔗 HN thread: https://lnkd.in/eNS-pwHs
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Ray Villalobos liked thisRay Villalobos liked thisCoding skills got us here. Orchestration skills will define what's next. I've mapped out exactly what I think is coming and why it changes everything about how we work, lead, and build. See the full timeline in the graphic below 👇 Follow along if you want to help shape what comes next.
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Ray Villalobos liked thisRay Villalobos liked thisLet’s be honest…When we don’t respect the boss, we do the bare minimum. I’ve been guilty of this. We all have. You clock in. Do the work. Go home. But when we respect them? We’re going out of our way to help the team win. We say things like: “I can make it work.” “Have you thought about this?” “What if we got creative and tried X, Y, Z?!” We lean in and chip in to make the impossible, possible. So the real question is: How do you become the kind of leader people want to follow… not just have to? I want to build a team that: ✅ Understands the big picture (and calls it out when we’ve lost the plot) ✅ Notices small tweaks that lead to big improvements ✅ Feels safe sharing bold or “wild” ideas This week on Coffee With Kim, I’m hosting a solo mini workshop on leading with influence. We’re diving into: 👉🏼 How to lead without an official job title 👉🏼 Ways to motivate your team to take initiative (without forcing it) 👉🏼 Why being a positive influence directly impacts promotions and pay ✨ Try this today: The next time someone brings you an idea, resist the urge to evaluate it immediately. Instead ask: “Tell me more.” You’ll be surprised how quickly trust (and better ideas) start to build. Because influence isn’t about control. It’s about creating an environment where people want to contribute. 💬 What makes a leader someone you actually want to follow? Join us live to share your thoughts or catch the replay by subscribing to Coffee With Kim wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ray Villalobos liked thisJoin Ray and I in an hour for some good vibes!👇Ray Villalobos liked thisWant to turn a prompt into a working voice agent quickly? Join Ray Villalobos (LinkedIn Learning) and Thorsten Schaeff (Google DeepMind) live March 24th as we go from prompt to working, shareable agent inside Google AI Studio. We’ll build an interview‑practice agent together, then show you how to reuse and evolve it for new scenarios without starting over. Live demo. Real workflows. Your questions answered. 👉 Save your spot. #linkedinlearning #inlearning #vibecoding #googledeepmind #googlegemini
Experience
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LinkedIn
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Senior Interactive Designer
Tribune Interactive/The Orlando Sentinel
Education
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University of Central Florida
Bachelor's in Journalism Advertising & Public Relations
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BA Journalism
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Licenses & Certifications
Publications
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Net Magazine
Writer
See publicationAuthoring a number of articles focused on Front End Development and Full Stack Development topics including articles on Bootstrap, Front End JavaScript and Design Frameworks.
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Lynda.com/LinkedIn Courses
Lynda.com
See publicationProduce front end and full stack development courses for Lynda.com/LinkedIn including courses on Bootstrap, AngularJS, React, Sass, PostCSS, GulpJS, Grunt, NPM, Node & ExpressJS, D3 as well as a focus on JavaScript with courses on Functions, The DOM, Events, AJAX, JSON and more. Some of my courses have been translated to German and Japanese.
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English
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Spanish
Native or bilingual proficiency
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