AI Is Wrecking My CS Degree, and I'm Not the Problem

I’m hearing this more and more from both students and teachers. It seems like everyone in education is frustrated and can’t figure out how to use AI for education productively yet.

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.

Answers so far are assuming that this is complaining that their traditional CS course is not that useful for getting a job anymore.

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 envy educators right now.

AI clearly means you need to change how you teach and evaluate students. We are only a few years in though, and it's still extremely unclear what effective teaching with these tools looks like.

The worst part is that the evaluation loop is measured in multiple years! If you start trying some new education mechanism today you won't get a robust idea of how well it works until your current cohort graduate in 3-6 years time.

Students effectively all become guinea pigs for untested new ways of learning and teaching.

Hey.

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 used to have a lot of anxiety about Ai wiping out all the Software specific jobs, software development/testing/project management, etc. I actually do think that's still likely to be the case going forward. Pick an industry and try and become an expert in it. Someone will still have to prompt and dream up new features. There are still things that you can't prompt your way to, but they're on the relationship side, not the technical side. I'm not sure what I would say to someone currently doing a CS degree, Math degree, Physics degree, or wanting to do one. Most likely I would say if you want to have a stable income, get good at sales.

While AI is writing much much more of my code these days, I still need to be able to speak intelligently about what I am building, why I chose a given design and the tradeoffs between alternatives. When fixing things, it's still important to understand what broke and why. I don't think that will ever change in any organization that operates in high compliance environments or cares about delivering high quality products.

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.

> Coursework design has gone down the toilet. I mean, it was never perfect to begin with.

At my uni they had us doing assignments in assembly on day one, before anything was actually taught. The lab handbook said "your first year programing courses will serve you well." lol. Apparently it used to be a 2nd year course and they just moved it to the first semester of the first year unmodified, for no apparent reason.

Had a similar experience at other universities and other courses. This was in the Netherlands so maybe it's different in other countries but my experience is that it functions mostly as a filter for people who already know the material rather than actually teaching you anything.

Over half of people fail the first year (and are banned from repeating it, for 5 years), which is considered normal and acceptable. So it's more of a selection mechanism than anything else.

So I said to a friend who's choosing a university right now, "just don't expect them to actually teach you anything", which is a pretty sad thing to say for an educational institution.

Despite the massive suck all around, I very much like the idea of university, and did enjoy many aspects of my time there, especially the projects. (And I've followed some lectures from other universities on YouTube, where I experienced actual learning, and -- god forbid -- actual joy!)