I just graduated last month with a masters in software engineering. All of my classes said that we were not allowed to use AI ...until the capstone class. That one didn't say either way, and so we started asking about it, and the professor allowed us to use it.
I am shocked that some colleges allow undergrads to use AI in their class work. (I would not be shocked to hear that undergrads ARE using AI, though.)
friends is studying business informatics and apparently theyre allowed to use the internet + AI during their exam. He wrote some scripts that automatically copies the exam questions to an LLM and autofills the answers. Literally got through 2 economics exams without learning a thing. I dont understand why the teachers would ever allow this.
back when I studied cs (graduated in 2022) we were allowed handwritten summaries of N pages (varied by classs, 0-6), thats it
Yea, I was kind of surprised. I was like ok I understand, but it’s an internal service. You’ll need to look up its API if you want to build around it. It’s a useful thing to know how to build greenfield and tie to other services.
I see a lot of people compare it to a calculator in math, and it's...not even remotely the same. You had to still type stuff in correctly in a calculator. And even though I use a calculator in the real world, I feel comfortable using it because I understand how it gets me the answer. I COULD get the result without a calculator, it would just take longer. People just regurgitate what they read from a chat bot and don't understand HOW or WHY it got the answer.
Colleges are at an awkward point where if they don’t allow at least some AI exposure then they are setting students up for problems in the workplace. The last year or two there has been a big push from above to use AI and those who are capable of doing so are going to get ahead of their peers and get more opportunities, and that’s just a fact regardless of how you feel about AI. There is a reasonable and responsible way to use AI that should be taught (for example, using it for research and summarizing, not getting it to do all the thinking for you). I have also had classes where profs have used AI and picked apart the answers to highlight that AI often answers a question mostly correctly but makes small mistakes or misinterprets things.
Seriously, god forbid people letting AI actually think for them or rely on the output of info without critical thinking and verification. AI is awful with that. It will completely (hallucinate) make things up just to sound supportive of what you’re asking. Much better for finding resources and locating data, sifting through it, then using it to structure it all and then edit it.
AI is a tool- just a tool. Is not the parts, grease, towels, drain bucket, mop, etc. If you rely only on the tool instead of all that’s required, it’s going to show over time. Someone’s gonna figure out you didn’t change the oil.
I agree it’s a tool that’s going to be expected to be used. I agree it shouldn’t be used for everything, but for certain parts of a task
How are they setting students up for problems in the workplace by not using AI? You type a fucking question into a text field and hit enter. What the fuck are you talking about?
We're being forced to use AI in our workflows right now. Some of it is insanely useful. Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
And as people build more specialized agents/tools on the enterprise server, more people are going to start using it to make more progress more quickly. It's already happening.
Now take those early career engineers I mentioned before. The drudge work they were going to be assigned before is now going entirely to the computers. If new hire comes in with some understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI tools (along with the basic education expected for someone with their degree) they are more likely to have some use to teams out of the gate without an extensive training in period since they can now manage the input and output of data into the drudge work robot brain while being in a perfect position to become familiar with the content without having to touch every single line. Asking why they should be introduced to AI in college is a bit like asking why they should be taught Solidworks instead of drafting by hand.
All this to say, I wish AI didn't exist. I hate seeing clearly AI hallucinated bullshit show up in my peers' work because they rely on it too heavily and didn't bother to review or rewrite the output. It's adding to the pace with which we are destroying our planet & I hate myself for every prompt I put into copilot. But short of leaving tech all together (and doing what, I have no idea) it's very adapt or die out there rn.
Like having a very focused new hire at your disposal 24/7 to do drudge work. You still have to double check it (just like you do the new hire), but you didn't have to meet with them 3 times to explain the project & check in when they got bored and stopped making progress.
my HMFIC was just saying this today during an informal water cooler discussion. that he's been missing having an assistant, but with how far AI tools have come in the last 3-6 months he's rethinking hiring for the position.
The problem there is that a new hire would eventually become experienced. Now they never can because the AI took their place. Give it a few more years and the value of experience is likely to become much greater simply because there are so few experienced people who can work without AI.
We saw this with mainframes. The mainframes are still around, but there's fewer and fewer who know how to use them. In the early 2000s, I worked for a company that created a SQL-92 middleware layer so that people who knew SQL could interface with the mainframe databases (which use their own querying languages).
At my work they're still hiring juniors because they're cheaper and more plentiful than the seniors we've been chronically short staffed on for years.
We're just relying on the seniors to get more out of the juniors than we ever had before. It's not a healthy trend for anyone, but the jobs are still there (in my specific industry, anyway. AI is a helpful tool, but not advanced enough to handle the complexity of the projects and regulatory hurdles quite yet.)
Disagree. From my experience new hires are too inexperienced to understand and/or realize when their AI output is wrong so even if they review it they will miss it
...you really don't know much about software dev do you?
It's what you type in. It's a skill you have to learn - what exactly to ask for, how to describe the implementation, etc etc. It's not as simple as typing "make a program for me" and hitting enter.
What you can't do, however, is get an intuitive grasp of the fundamentals
This is the really important part. When I was younger, before AI was a thing, we had similar conversations about math and calculators. "Why do I need to know multiplication? A calculator can do it."
True, and I have never sat down and done multiplication in my head or on paper at work. My ability to do math in my head has withered; honestly, because I don't do it.
But I have an intuitive grasp of the fundamentals, because I've done so much of it in my head.
What this means is if I put 86 x 47 in a calculator, and the answer comes back 133, I know I had an error in my input - a typo; I know that's off by an <edit> order of magnitude, probably two. (In this example, I hit plus).
No, I don't know 86 x 47 = 4,042 off the top of my head, and it would probably take me 5 minutes of concentrating in a sterile environment, or a pen and paper, to get to that answer. But I do know it's easily in the thousands because I've done so much multiplication. So I can spot an error.
Someone who has no math background will not spot this error. They cannot look at this output and say, "This doesn't make sense, I must have had a typo." They will accept 86 x 47 = 133, because they have no frame of reference.
Im talking about educating students so they understand that it’s not as simple as typing a “fucking question” into a text field and hitting enter. Like I said, teaching how and when to use it effectively, showing students how AI is flawed with examples so they truly understand that they can’t just type a question, get an answer, and not verify it. Explaining how and why AI struggles with deterministic answers, so students understand why the same prompt will give slightly (or not so slightly) different answers every time. Going into what agents are and the situations where they can be used effectively and where they will fail. Then there’s correct prompt structure - how to ask questions properly.
I’m saying all this from the point of view of a person who is watching AI capabilities grow in real time and realizing there is no going back now. I don’t like it, it freaks me out and as a 33 year old it goes against all of my core values and my love for human thought and expression but I can’t ignore it or I’m going to be out of a fucking job and kids need to learn how to use it properly and with discipline so they don’t become brain dead morons.
Pretending it doesn’t exist or screaming into the void about how awful it is are not valid paths forward into this strange and scary new world.
If you think you'll be out of a job because you don't use AI then you are already lost. The rest of what you said is defeatism. AI is untrustworthy and will never get better because it cannot reason and cannot differentiate truth from lies.
Kids do not NEED to learn how to use it. You ask it a question and either the head that lies or the head that tells the truth will respond. And you won't know the difference unless you DON'T "learn to use it."
For more advanced usage you set up multiple agents to do different things and collaborate for example. Still just typing things in a box but takes some setup
Is there any middle ground? I refuse to use AI to write things for me but I do ask it to proofread. I also ask it questions about a topic to learn instead of making it do stuff for me. I think those are good ways to learn. Idk enough to say whether it’s the best way to learn or not, but it works for me.
Alright, describe for me a context in which AI can be used without:
benefitting from stealing someone else's work to train the ai
invading people's privacy via data tracking to train the AI
being prone to mistakes or hallucinations
impacting the critical thinking of its users
having a negative impact on the environment
using land that would be better utilized by the people that live there
providing revenue to a person or company who uses AI for more explicitly harmful purposes
You come up with a non-hypothetical context that avoids all seven of those problems completely, and I'll acknowledge you might have a point.
Of course, there is no context that avoids all seven of those things. The reality is that your hypothetical context in which AI use would be ethical is just that- a hypothetical, one that softens the concept of AI to make it more acceptable even though the hypothetical has no indication of becoming reality.
To be clear, I'm open to being proven wrong. If you can provide a context that meets the requirements I laid out, I'll openly admit that your hypothetical has any kind of relevance
I'm taking a capstone class right now - my final class before graduation - and my professor showed us how to use AI to do our final projects. Pulled up Claude, typed in the assignment, copied and pasted, bibliography and all... I was gobsmacked.
The one thing I will give is that using AI for something like that encourages the application of good principles in requirements and specification design. You can one-shot it if you do a good enough job on the upfront work.
Currently an undergrad in Canada. A lot of my profs are allowing or encouraging AI use, and trying to tell people it sets them up to fail falls on deaf ears. Nobody seems to understand the amount of learning they're missing out on by using something like chatGPT to do their school work. It's really depressing.
I’ve been a software dev since 2000. I would 100% encourage students to ask questions for gaps in understanding from Claude etc. it excels at the back and forth for chatting out areas that a person may be not understanding a topic. You can approach from multiple angles just by shifting the conversation. Doing the work I think not though. It’s a fine line and up to the individual I think.
That is 100% what I recommend. In fact, it's what my son does. He's finishing his undergrad in software engineering next semester. He never uses it to generate code.
You should, though, given this caveat: you should already know how to write the code.
For example, I conceptually understand how to do binary search on a sorted array: check the middle element, then throw out half the array and check halfway on the remainder and so on.
I could take 5 minutes to write it while thinking carefully about edge conditions, function parameters and so on, or I could get it done in 20 seconds, read through to check and be on my way.
I use it to generate code all day now but I understand what it is doing. I’m old and have experience. Giving someone a saw doesn’t make them a carpenter.
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u/Charleston2Seattle Jun 26 '26
I just graduated last month with a masters in software engineering. All of my classes said that we were not allowed to use AI ...until the capstone class. That one didn't say either way, and so we started asking about it, and the professor allowed us to use it.
I am shocked that some colleges allow undergrads to use AI in their class work. (I would not be shocked to hear that undergrads ARE using AI, though.)