I have been doing this professionally for over twenty years, and I still learn something every day. Over the past couple years, with AI augmentation, I learn even more, move faster and go deeper into the systems that I work on.

A CS degree was never going to provide you with all of the tools that you need for a successful career. It provided you with the basics to get your foot in the door.

AI is not replacing you or an education. AI is raising the bar of what you can comprehend and retain. From someone who is technically minded (and self-taught), all I have ever wanted is to keep learning.

That’s not what it’s about. It’s actually from someone who genuinely wants to learn for the sake of learning who’s talking about how AI is creating havoc in her studies.

I don't think programming becoming 'easier' has make understanding programs any easier or less important. Even if all of the above goes away, I think computer science has taught me a lot about how to think about problems.

It was interesting to see things change towards the end. Some was the chaos from the lack of consistency the article highlights just starting to emerge. Mostly though, it was just the rampant surge in cheating and the classes not being prepared for it.

First off, congrats on spending time doing side projects in OpenProcessing. Keep working on projects that keep you motivated and keep you learning.

We've been there, lost in our learning paths. Even before AI there were times when we were overwhelmed with our CS journey. You'll overcome, don't you worry about that.

The CS degree was never the end of the learning journey. It was always _what you put into it_. You'll learn what you practice, and uni just happens to be a good place to practice things. Whether that's optimizing AI harnesses, understanding how CPU caches work, crunching pixels on a GPU or the principles of distributed computing... it will all make you a better thinker and good at what you do one day.

Stay curious.

I'm also now reminded that this is ran by that same guy who complained about the MIT license allowing people to do whatever they wish.

Provide examples.

It's hard for readers to gauge whether you're complaints are legitimate or overreactions.

TBH I’m also thinking about how to use AI at work for learning. (My work environment is 100% all-in on AI.) Everyone can see and admit that AI coding is making us lazier and that it produces too much code to do old-style line by line reviews. Some people are using agent teams to churn out millions of lines of code where there’s zero hope of reviewing it. We don’t yet know how to keep quality high and complexity low while doing agent coding, we’re just having them write lots of tests and hoping that when things break they’re easy to fix. Agents should get better at broad architecture in the future, but they’re definitely not there yet.

> The amount of work involved has also tripled

This has to be one of the big ironies of using AI. I’ve heard this from other students too. The problem is that old-style assignments where the level of difficulty was hand-crafted is way way too easy for an LLM, therefore teachers need to crank the level of difficulty so the student has to actually spend some time on the assignment. But LLMs are getting better every month and the difficulty is so high that no students can possibly do the assignment by hand and now small errors in assignment design can lead to large errors in effort and time required.

> Whereas before, assignments were designed by a person who thought them through at least once, then approved by other people in the department, now I doubt they're getting read more than once (if that). Errors abound, often with corrections coming a week or two before the deadline.

This is entirely unacceptable. Professors who are using AI to generate assignments and course loads need to be discipline and removed if they can’t start doing their job.

From the title I thought I was going to be reading an article wondering how AI would devalue a CS degree, but this is actually a story about a CS program falling apart because the instructors are flailing about without AI.

   File under "old man yells at clouds."

   I think it's worth asking what  a CS degree is for.  Is it
   to teach you how to  code and make you obviously hire-able
   by industry?  Maybe  it's to teach you how  to think about
   data and code?   If you think it's the former,  then AI is
   probably going  to be a  problem for you.  If  the latter,
   it's neutral to somewhat good.

   I've  been hiring  CS  grads for  4  decades (yikes!)  and
   there's  definitely  been  a   shift.   Not  all  existing
   programs are  bad.  Not all  young software devs  are bad.
   But...  the  percentage  of  recent  grads  that  seem  to
   understand  what data  processing  systems  are about  has
   definitely fallen.

   Us  old farts  in industry  must share  some of  the blame
   here.   Our industry  seems  to be  pretty  boom or  bust.
   Someone comes in with a stack of money and tells people to
   build { the web | blockchain | AI | virtual worlds | etc }
   and suddenly  there's a  rush.  At the  start of  the gold
   rush, we're not sure how  to build everything that's going
   to be the next google [[1]] so we fill the room with young
   kids  who have  seen  some recent  tooling  and will  work
   cheap.   We  don't  develop  them.  We  want  them  to  be
   compliant drones  dancing to  a tune played  by a  CTO and
   VP/Eng who got their jobs  because they're the children of
   the fund investors who gave the startup a bunch of money.

   And then  we go back  to Universities and tell  them "OMG!
   Your not bar-raising your grads by teaching them __fill in
   the blank__!" [[2]]

   So... I  don't doubt  it looks like  AI is  destroying the
   degree.   But maybe  it's just  making it  hard to  ignore
   previous problems with the uni to industry pipeline.

   And I didn't  mention the Mythical Man Month  once in this
   comment.  I'm getting better.

   1. I'm not  sure too many people want to  be Google at the
      moment, but  over the last 25  years, they've certainly
      done well.

   2. I'm  intentionally misspelling  "you're" because  in my
      time in industry,  I've found only about  15% of people
      would pass a 7th grade spelling test.

No one needs AI in universities or software engineering. It only benefits the middle managers and mediocre people who jump on any bandwagon in order to help their careers.

No software has gotten any better since AI, except that some forgotten bugs from the 1990s were found, just as 20000+ bugs have been found by the Luddite OssFuzz system before AI.

It's awkward, you're very unlikely to stop students from using AI for certain assignments (i.e: first programming class) for the good of their fundamentals, but there's also no other teaching tool being used to get them equivalent experience to solving assignments without AI.

I haven't seen a better example of "those who can't do, teach" than CS professors.

They gave Wesley a laser scalpel, to teach him to chisel wood, with whatever his mind could picture.

Wesley complained, he said, "dood, this isn't art! i'm not even chiseling!"

And the mentor-kidnapper said, "No, Wesley, you are doing art. The art is in your mind. The tool is just doing the work."

And so then Wesley threw the perfect wooden dolphin at the wall, infuriated that all the pleasure had been removed from the art. But he lived the rest of his life on that planet, making perfect wooden laser sculpted dolphins, cause that was his job and his boss told him too bad.

For a little while Wesley made popsicle stick art during his free time at night to try and feel the sensation of choice and control, but eventually just gave up and played mariokart until he was an old man.