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AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

503 points by prakashqwerty 4mo ago

echelon 4mo ago
This is ridiculous. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle. This is the equivalent of "you wouldn't download a car". (Yes, we would.) The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students. Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines. More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.
- ex-aws-dude 4mo ago
  > The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students. So now students are _required_ to use agents? That's a bit crazy Would universities be paying the token cost? Is that you Dario?
  - hparadiz 4mo ago
    I mean you kinda have to own a computer to be in this industry at all. Back in the 90s there was a clear distinction between someone who had a computer and someone who didn't in so far as what they could do. Maybe a subscription might be a requirement soon. Overall it's much less money than what my parents had to spend on my computer in the 90s. In inflation adjusted dollars they spent over 5k on just my tech before I was even 13 years old.
  - echelon 4mo ago
    > Would universities be paying the token cost? Is that you Dario? A Claude subscription is like 1/5th the cost of one textbook.
xiaoyu2006 4mo ago
I always wonder why there is such course. Using agent ai coding tool is trivial.
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  When calorie dense food and gas powered vehicles came on the scene, humans (generally) got fat and out of shape. "Why eat that salad and go for a run?" one might say, "This cheesecake tastes much better and I can just drive wherever I want to go." Getting fat is one thing, but getting stupid is another, and I really fear for the future of humanity when it becomes so easy to sidestep the processes that let us actually learn and grow because stuff like "using agent ai coding is trivial".
  - gaiagraphia 4mo ago
    There's different skills at play, and they're both as valuable as each other. They shouldn't be thrown into a big soup with shaky aims. We still - as a society - manage to have PE and driving as different subjects. The same can equally apply here.
- walrusted 4mo ago
  using a coding tool is trivial, correct. so is using a microwave oven or its larger counter-parts. you need a certain level of person to know if what came out of it was Michelin-star or not and I do not think Stanford is going for Hot Pockets here.
mi_lk 4mo ago
good intention but useless let's be real
- LVB 4mo ago
  Seeing my own kids (teens) go through some of this, I'm becoming slightly less pessimistic as it all shakes out. Among their peer groups there does seem to be an opinion forming that sure, anyone can just ask ChatGPT for quick answers on assignments, but actually knowing stuff is a bit of a "flex" that's respected.
  - neutronicus 4mo ago
    Teens also fucking hate AI, on a cultural-ideological level.
    - bdangubic 4mo ago
      I think they may hate what it may be doing to their future outlooks but they use it as much as they do social media
      - neutronicus 4mo ago
        Yeah, that's exactly why I added the second clause. Nevertheless. The peer pressure is to be anti-AI.
      - jimbokun 4mo ago
        They use it and hate it at the same time.
        hparadiz 4mo ago
        I hate it sometimes too. But it's sort of like being mad at math.
        jimbokun 4mo ago
ohmahjong 4mo ago
This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like
- llbbdd 4mo ago
  Agreed. I don't know how they plan to enforce this but this is way better than some other articles that have come up indicating educational bans on AI use, in-person proctoring, verbal assessments, pen and paper exams etc. This is the first attempt at an approach I've seen that doesn't seek to isolate education from reality; students that are effective at integrating AI into their work and actually understand what they're doing are going to get jobs, which is ultimately the goal of school.
- JohnMakin 4mo ago
  They're only cheating themselves in a world that increasingly cares about knowledge (market trend of seniors being preferable hires to fresh out of school juniors) and not the piece of paper that "proved" you had such knowledge.
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    I agree with you that they are cheating themselves. Unfortunately, a bunch of 18-22 year olds also don't tend to have the maturity to realize that fact. I imagine that the university is trying to nudge them to do the courses in a way that helps themselves because they know otherwise the students won't be wise enough to do that.
    - johnfn 4mo ago
      These students are making a tradeoff between an abstract notion of "cheating themselves" and a very concrete notion of "having a worse GPA". The second one translates obviously and directly to job prospects.
behnamoh 4mo ago
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NickNaraghi 4mo ago
This would be an interesting approach if the course supplied a custom Harness (perhaps in place of a textbook) and this was part of the instruction set inside of it. As a standalone thing you ask students to import into their agent, seems unlikely to work.
- abahgat 4mo ago
  To be fair, shipping these guidelines as AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md in the repo that contains the assignments will make it so that agents will pick this up without needing students to opt in explicitly. Seems like a reasonable first step to me
cute_boi 4mo ago
And, yes students are going to follow it....
georgemcbay 4mo ago
> What AI Agents SHOULD NOT Do > * Run bash commands Students who prefer to use zsh keep winning.
- MengerSponge 4mo ago
  zsh is fine, but I prefer fish. It has a funnier name!
simonw 4mo ago
Hah, I like that these are presented as a CLAUDE.md. (They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)
- matltc 4mo ago
  I wouldn't hold my breath.
- israrkhan 4mo ago
  We symlink AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md to a single file in our repo
  - cpeterso 4mo ago
    You can also include other md files like AGENTS.md in CLAUDE.md: @AGENTS.md
- bakugo 4mo ago
  They won't, because forcing the file to be named after their product is an intentional marketing choice. Free advertising on every repo that has it.
  - dymk 4mo ago
    They won’t until the winds change, and people start talking about the tradeoffs of Claude Code vs any of the other thousand good quality agent harnesses out there that recognize AGENTS.md Opencode is good enough for most workflows IME, even if it doesn’t have the kitchen sink of features as cc
- globular-toast 4mo ago
  > I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too. Surely such a trivial feature could be implemented in seconds using e.g. Claude? It's not about them not "hurrying up".
overfits-ai 4mo ago
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sgirard 4mo ago
This is interesting. I don't know how the AI agent guidelines will be enforced because there will always be a model outside the curriculum that a student can use to bypass the guidelines. Encouraging academic integrity is useful but requires the student to buy into the idea that they are paying for an education, not a diploma. This is a tough problem and I have been wondering how CS departments are incorporating AI into the curriculum while encouraging appropriate use in a learning environment.
- itopaloglu83 4mo ago
  Well, no amount of instructions would work if the student has no intention to learn anything.
- gchamonlive 4mo ago
  In an ideal world guidelines should be suggestions for those willing to make the best of the course and improve as a person and professional. However a degree has real world value and repercussions, so enabling someone incompetent to do a dangerous job can put innocent lives in jeopardy. It's tough, but I hope in time we learn how to live with this new tech.
- earthnail 4mo ago
  Stanford has an honour code. Meant no oversight even during exams. Worked surprisingly well when I was there. The flipside is, if you’re ever caught cheating, there are no second chances. I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.
  - asdff 4mo ago
    >Worked surprisingly well when I was there. How could you tell? I proctored. People cheat pretty frequently and other students are none the wiser. It really takes like 4 proctors if you want to do it right. Even then I'm sure the clever ones are slipping through. These were scantron though. Short response/essay format you'd be screwed if you didn't know your stuff.
    - 4mo ago
ritzaco 4mo ago
yeah I don't think that's going to work - it would be kind of like "we're releasing model answers to all assignments but please only use them as a teaching aid and don't copy from them" best to a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access
- harikb 4mo ago
  Laptop without internet access, sure. Pencil and paper? that is brutal :)
  - artificialLimbs 4mo ago
    I did most of my CS class tests this way within the last year. It’s not that bad because prof doesn’t care about syntax so much (unless that’s what we’re testing on of course) and details, but wanting instead to make sure we understand broader concepts.
  - dybber 4mo ago
    20 years ago this was not unheard of. One exam we had to translate C code to assembly for one of the exercises, convert to numbers to IEEE754 representations and similar, both tasks where access to a laptop would make it possible to cheat. Also had to modify some small computer architecture diagrams if I recall correctly. For the linear algebra written exam it didn’t work as if you learned to solve the 4 previous years exams, you could be sure most of it was familiar, so you could just prepare for a few standard exercises without really understanding the content. Our advanced algorithm course used a bit of a combination, with a project take home exam (knapsack like optimization problem - competing for the fastest implementation) combined with a two hour written exam with multiple choice answers, but again only with books, pencil and paper to get to the right answer. This I think could work today, having both the opened ended project + some multiple choice with pencil/paper.
recursivedoubts 4mo ago
I think these are based on the one I posted a while back: https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
- brunborg 4mo ago
  Yes absolutely! We linked your version inside the extended AI policy document, but forgot to add it to our website cs336.stanford.edu
  - recursivedoubts 4mo ago
    that's awesome i'm glad you guys found it useful please let me know if you make improvements, I'd love to iterate on it
- alexhans 4mo ago
  Congrats. This seems like a great prompt to ensure a useful default experience. People should not confuse this with "anti cheating" and instead helping people learn how to learn. Do you have further insights on AI and education since?
ChrisArchitect 4mo ago
Related: CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357075
farmeroy 4mo ago
I really like this. I'm currently doing a part time BSc and my current module explicitly allows AI usage as long as you 'cite it'. The guidelines are out of date in that they assume you are using a chatbot and not a coding harness. The temptation to have claude write all my pandas code has become too difficult for my self control, but at the same time I actively feel my education is suffering from using it. As I write my final paper I am thankful that I at least despise AI writing too much to use it for the actual marked assessment, but I still feel that I have cheated myself out of part of my education and probably wasted a lot of time going fast in the wrong direction because generating data frames, graphs, statistics, etc. is just so easy with claude
gaiagraphia 4mo ago
Is this all an elite educational institution with about $50bil in assets could muster, lol? This is completely and utterly unenforceable, and such, worthless. There really needs to be diversity in delivery styles for different modules of courses according to their aims, with 'ai access' as a key variable. If AI is allowed, it should be based on $x of usage/student, with an audit trail to prove no external funding was used, and module aims based on using AI to the max while conserving token use. Like actually creating wild, ambitious shit which takes cutting edge services to the max. If AI is not allowed for a module, then it really needs to go back to the old skool, with handwritten exams, or coding using old machines and textbooks. Some skills, techniques, etc, really do need drilling. Straddling the middle will help nobody, result in accusations, increase the burden on teaching staff, and result in a course without a realistic focus. Though I guess if you're a big brand university, you don't really need to care about innovating. The money will keep pouring in. The whole further education sector is in dire need of a shake up.
- chalupa-supreme 4mo ago
  I don’t really know why this is getting downvoted. It’s clear that higher education is degrading because of easy to reach AI solutions that have no type of penalties for use. During my undergrad it was normal to see people refer to Chegg solutions to get their answers, or as a friend for theirs. Maybe there’s a reason my first CS professor wrote out Java code with pencil and paper I guess.
rossant 4mo ago
Interesting. It makes me think of the idea of fighting piracy by providing a solid legal alternative through streaming platforms, etc.
cush 4mo ago
This is such a realistic balance between completely banning coding agents and embracing the spirit of higher education
- jchigg2000 4mo ago
  I agree. Learning to code from scratch today would be difficult to say the least. The scar tissue accrued from debugging a compilable typo, a misplaced comma or parenthesis teaches something that's hard to recreate - but replacing it with durable learning that won't age-out is a definite win.
  - xxandroxygen 4mo ago
    Why let the robot speak for you?
    - jchigg2000 4mo ago
      I'd be interested to hear which sequence of tokens triggered your "robot authored" pattern match? You may want to tune the mechanism.
      - mainecoder 4mo ago
        no tuning necessary you got caught with your pants down. Now write a poem on the efficacy of hammers in solving headaches.
        jchigg2000 4mo ago
        +2 to the unnameable pattern match
soldeace 4mo ago
I'm definitely going to use a variation of it for learning new programming languages.
xydac 4mo ago
This is a very good baseline for future courses to build on, there would always be a group that wants to jailbreak this and thats okay, but have baseline agent support learning is needed in this ai first world.
- ezfe 4mo ago
  Jailbreaking isn’t even needed - you can just modify the file
  - xydac 4mo ago
    I was probably thinking of a future where future devices from education institutions would have these preloaded with a non modifiable version of agents guardrails tuned for learning...
andersmurphy 4mo ago
Seems like a pretty close copy of Carson's (of HTMX fame) agent.md from 5 months ago https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
- philipportner 4mo ago
  They reference the gist of 1cg in the honor code section of CS336. https://cs336.stanford.edu/ https://cs336.stanford.edu/
lukeigel 4mo ago
Pangram reports as 100% AI generated. Makes sense for a README, but a tad bit funny given that their students must hand-write code
xyzal 4mo ago
I am really baffled by the comments in the spirit of "this is unenforceable, and therefore worthless". I bet most people would not steal even if they knew they could get away with it.
- CamperBob2 4mo ago
  I mean, some would say that's how this whole thing got started.
- gaiagraphia 4mo ago
  Students are struggling to get work after graduating because they're dropped into a competitive environment. Ideals aren't enough to get jobs in the current environment. Universities should be places which are at the bleeding edge of development and providing society with the best new ideas/tech, etc has to offer. Junior workers should be hotbeds of exciting talent which have the ability to revolutionise industries. By creating such milquetoast environments to study in, which are seemingly scared or unable to prepare people for the future, students are being done a disservice. Far too many people are far too comfortable with their cushty positions, and it's not doing the youth any favours.
  - xboxnolifes 4mo ago
    Im confused, are you suggesting students using AI to do their assignments for them and have them learn nothing will benefit them more or less in the future when they entire a competitive environment?
    - Terr_ 4mo ago
      I feel it's either: 1. Everyone already employed is "cheating" and not using fundamentals. Therefore to prepare them for the workforce them must just learn to "cheat" effectively... at the expense of the "ideals" (read: direct skills or knowledge.) 2. "Milquetoast environments" -- A general "tough love" trope, but I'm unclear on how this tough-school will somehow match the unique issues of the tough-work. Mix incompatible types of difficulty and people are just worse-off. For that matter, why not flip the argument around? If the future competition everyone slinging stuff through LLM slop all day, perhaps ensuring students have fundamental skills to differentiate themselves becomes more important, rather than less.
walrusted 4mo ago
I just took a C1 Spanish class and it had almost exactly the same instructions. Hmmm and I do not wonder why...
aaaronic 4mo ago
I'm trying something similar this semester with my course via AGENTS.md. I think this one is overly verbose and probably falls out of context windows pretty quickly, based on my experience (for me, a very terse but clear set of 30 lines performed better than providing examples and more nuanced explanations during my testing with a few models). I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do everything for me," but I also am trying out telling it to generate a .history folder with a markdown history of every prompt and a summary of the action take in response. I _know_ there are some tools that offer the prompt history automatically, but I've told students they can use _whatever_ tool they want, but should let me know if the folder isn't showing up as they work. The .history folder is required if they used AI and I intend to review it and try to give specific feedback to the students using it as too much of a crutch. I just started this last Friday, so wish me luck!
- j_french 4mo ago
  I wish you good luck! And add that I'd be interested to hear how you get on. I intend to adopt a similar approach with my classes in September. The . history folder is a great idea. How do you intend to assess your students?
  - aaaronic 4mo ago
    I told them up front this was new territory and we're all learning from it. If they're overusing it I assured them they won't be dealing with a student integrity issue, but I will be giving them feedback if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments. I'm hoping they learn to use it as a tool instead of trying to offload all cognition to it. This is a CS course targeted at non-majors, so thankfully the "fundamentals" aren't as critical as the overall themes and general skills.
    - knollimar 4mo ago
      "if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments." Not sure if this is fair. Consider some ofher poor study tool. Would you dock their grade for using externally curated flash cards too much?
overgard 4mo ago
It's a good idea, at the very least it communicates intent to students, but couldn't students just modify CLAUDE.md and not check in their changes to that?
baddash 4mo ago
Even though it seems radical, I think the right approach is to simply allow the students to use AI to its full potential, to generate answers, code, whatever. The onus should be on the instructor to make sure that the student ends up actually understanding and being able to code/solve problems that they pose without using coding agents. Why? Because: 1. this is exactly what is going on in the real world. People are able to get AI to do whatever the hell they want, but the ones who just use it lazily end up with huge cognitive debts and codebases riddled with opaque bugs that they do not understand whatsoever. If we prevent students from confronting this temptation, then we are sort of coddling or shielding them from it, and not really preparing them to avoid pitfalls of this type. 2. you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn. i personally think it's pretty fucking lame to handicap a student's ability to learn in an attempt to prevent lazy abuse. isn't the whole point of a grade to measure how well you understand things? can't you have pop quizzes, assignments on a computer with no agent use, written tests, etc etc. to catch the lazy abusers? this is an unnecessary prevention of lazy abuse that unfairly handicaps learning
- __float 4mo ago
  > you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn. Even if you "actually care to learn", this is a huge mental shortcut and you're deceiving yourself if you think deep learning is happening from looking at the answer. On top of that, the pressures to just finish the coursework and move on to your other homework due tomorrow seems pretty high. Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we?
  - baddash 4mo ago
    Not from simply looking at the answer. From knowing the answer and reverse-engineering or understanding how to arrive at that answer in the first place. It's not always the best way of learning, but it definitely is a great way to learn if you care to actually understand why it is the answer and how you would have arrived at it. > Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we? My suggestion is just the former, it doesn't imply the latter.
cba_wllm 4mo ago
Stanford is industry compliant and teaches the youth to outsource their thinking to BigTech. No surprise here, the donors will be happy. The "but we do not let them write code directly" is a smoke screen to appease critics and parents. Yes, hello parents, you pay for your offspring to become a mindless industry tool.
brcmthrowaway 4mo ago
What's the estimated RoI on doing this course?
joshmayer 4mo ago
i think people out of school underestimate the power of exams. there's a huge difference in classes recently between ones with and without exams. if there is an exam, people are way more likely to study and therefore actually learn
londons_explore 4mo ago
As an employer, I want AI to be fully allowed for assignments, and the assignments to be made trickier to compensate. Let's train people to use all the tools available to solve the hardest problems, rather than solving toy problems with a slide rule.
- unglaublich 4mo ago
  What a ridiculous take. Just because solutions exist in the llm training data, doesn't make these problems 'toy' or 'easy'. The human 'engineering hardness' scale doesn't align with what an llm can and can't do.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  You have to balance that with teaching the skills needed to understand the domain sufficiently to take over when the model gets things wrong.
- dogleash 4mo ago
  As an employer, I want education to be robust from the ground up, not turn uni into an attempt to bootcamp whatever is hot today. I don't think a 4 year postsecondary education is enough time to make a developer that can hit the ground running. Not if it's 100% of class time on CS theory. Nor if it were 4 years of vocational training and labwork that leaned heavy into AI. Nor some mix. We train on the job heavily, it's just not possible to fit everything into the sausage grinder. So why not throw in some mandatory non-major electives? Take the time to do stuff that frustrates people who want uni to be a certificate mill. I don't care if green employees are experts at the exact narrow set of tools I use. I want them to be good at learning, and to have gotten most of the standard CS topics out of the way.
- recursivecaveat 4mo ago
  I don't think you will achieve much that way. Suppose you pair me with a plumber, an area I know almost nothing about. The plumber is not able to finish anything 'trickier' because they have an ignoramus looking over their shoulder. Maybe I can learn some things by watching, having things explained to me as they work. On the other hand if I just walk away there's no way to tell from the final product. You gotta learn the fundamentals to at least a comparable level to be able to contribute. Same reason you couldn't just google everything on your phone in calculus.
KaiShips 4mo ago
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tomtomatoide 4mo ago
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throwaway613746 4mo ago
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bcherny 4mo ago
For those using Claude Code, I recommend Learning mode to instruct Claude to walk you through implementing the solution yourself rather than doing it for you. It’s very helpful when diving into a new domain, and helps build lower level intuition. To enable it, run /config > output styles > Learning
- FistfulOfHaws 4mo ago
  Learning mode has been a huge help for me, it quickly became my favorite way to learn. I ended up created a “Coaching Mode” output style that took some of the learning concepts like stubbing todos for the users and added other intructions that better fit how I learn
  - nbbaier 4mo ago
    This sounds neat - do you have this publicly available?
    - bigmadshoe 4mo ago
      I think it’s a part of official Claude code.
      - nbbaier 4mo ago
        I meant your specific tweaks
niam 4mo ago
Calling an entity that's forbidden from acting on your behalf an "agent" seems funny but maybe it's meant as a catch-all term. Their use of "assistant" seems better for that purpose.
ryanthedev 4mo ago
Finally some sanity when it comes to AI.
donbventures 4mo ago
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charlie90 4mo ago
>Don't: Run bash commands This seems unreasonable to me. One of the best uses of AI is that you can just tell your computer what to do in natural language and it does it. Running bash commands isn't part of the education, its busy work.
- ohrus 4mo ago
  Why wouldn't it be a part of the education?
- dimitrismrtzs 4mo ago
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- alfonsodev 4mo ago
  in the context of learning I think it's good to execute yourself then see what happens immediately, once you allow the agent to execute things, it tends to run several follow up commands when needed, an example from top of my head would be running a server that fails because the port is already in use, the agent will easily find the port and decide to kill it or not and then re-run the command, but if you run the command and see the error, then you get the chance to learn what's going on and how to fix it. You can still use the LLM to read the error and explain you why this happens, according to this guidelines.
robertnowell 4mo ago
this is like telling a student driver they have to push their car by hand instead of putting their foot on the pedal.
outside1234 4mo ago
I am questioning the experience level of the TA if they think that AGENTS.md is going to work.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  As an educator you have to trust that most students are there to learn, not to cheat. Some will cheat, of course, and you can try to stop it or detect it but it devolves into whack-a-mole and the cheater is probably more motivated than the instructor. Once they have graduated they will be on the job using LLMs and agents all day long, and their employers not only won't care they will be encouraging or requiring it.
zmysysz 4mo ago
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zjy71055 4mo ago
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haruka9527 4mo ago
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danielrmay 4mo ago
When reading this I'm reminded of Charles Petzold's 2005 article "Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?". https://www.charlespetzold.com/etcetera/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html https://www.charlespetzold.com/etcetera/DoesVisualStudioRotT...
- harrisi 4mo ago
  I know who Petzold is but I can't remember if I read this at the time. I do love it though. I was thinking a lot about generated code in Visual Studio a couple years after this article. It's kinda funny to think about various forms of code generation. From compilers to IDEs to parser generators to, now, LLMs. Even several higher level languages that compile to lower level languages are generative, essentially. Still not a fan of LLMs, but it's always a good to remember that the concept isn't entirely new or unique.
tpoacher 4mo ago
"Guidelines" eh? Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ojK9Q_ARE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ojK9Q_ARE
deleted 4mo ago
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h3n4l 4mo ago
Good practice for university of how to use agents in courses rather than forbidding those without distinction. Official AGENTS.md may be a new pattern in university courses.
Natalia724 4mo ago
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astm 4mo ago
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visha1v 4mo ago
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niros_valtos 4mo ago
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maxothex 4mo ago
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butlike 4mo ago
I always thought it might be good to reframe educational questions in the age of LLMs. Something like "An apple falls on Sir Isaac Newton's head and a photon passes the event horizon of a black hole. Get from A to B." This way, it becomes physically impossible to just query for an answer because the student themselves will have to show the line of reasoning, ideally presenting to the class how they got from A to B.
aautomatiza 4mo ago
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503 points by prakashqwerty 4mo ago

This is ridiculous. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle. This is the equivalent of "you wouldn't download a car". (Yes, we would.) The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students. Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines. More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.

ex-aws-dude 4mo ago
> The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students. So now students are _required_ to use agents? That's a bit crazy Would universities be paying the token cost? Is that you Dario?
- hparadiz 4mo ago
  I mean you kinda have to own a computer to be in this industry at all. Back in the 90s there was a clear distinction between someone who had a computer and someone who didn't in so far as what they could do. Maybe a subscription might be a requirement soon. Overall it's much less money than what my parents had to spend on my computer in the 90s. In inflation adjusted dollars they spent over 5k on just my tech before I was even 13 years old.
- echelon 4mo ago
  > Would universities be paying the token cost? Is that you Dario? A Claude subscription is like 1/5th the cost of one textbook.

xiaoyu2006 4mo ago

I always wonder why there is such course. Using agent ai coding tool is trivial.

hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
When calorie dense food and gas powered vehicles came on the scene, humans (generally) got fat and out of shape. "Why eat that salad and go for a run?" one might say, "This cheesecake tastes much better and I can just drive wherever I want to go." Getting fat is one thing, but getting stupid is another, and I really fear for the future of humanity when it becomes so easy to sidestep the processes that let us actually learn and grow because stuff like "using agent ai coding is trivial".
- gaiagraphia 4mo ago
  There's different skills at play, and they're both as valuable as each other. They shouldn't be thrown into a big soup with shaky aims. We still - as a society - manage to have PE and driving as different subjects. The same can equally apply here.
walrusted 4mo ago
using a coding tool is trivial, correct. so is using a microwave oven or its larger counter-parts. you need a certain level of person to know if what came out of it was Michelin-star or not and I do not think Stanford is going for Hot Pockets here.

mi_lk 4mo ago

good intention but useless let's be real

LVB 4mo ago
Seeing my own kids (teens) go through some of this, I'm becoming slightly less pessimistic as it all shakes out. Among their peer groups there does seem to be an opinion forming that sure, anyone can just ask ChatGPT for quick answers on assignments, but actually knowing stuff is a bit of a "flex" that's respected.
- neutronicus 4mo ago
  Teens also fucking hate AI, on a cultural-ideological level.
  - bdangubic 4mo ago
    I think they may hate what it may be doing to their future outlooks but they use it as much as they do social media
    - neutronicus 4mo ago
      Yeah, that's exactly why I added the second clause. Nevertheless. The peer pressure is to be anti-AI.
    - jimbokun 4mo ago
      They use it and hate it at the same time.
      - hparadiz 4mo ago
        I hate it sometimes too. But it's sort of like being mad at math.
        jimbokun 4mo ago

ohmahjong 4mo ago

This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like

llbbdd 4mo ago
Agreed. I don't know how they plan to enforce this but this is way better than some other articles that have come up indicating educational bans on AI use, in-person proctoring, verbal assessments, pen and paper exams etc. This is the first attempt at an approach I've seen that doesn't seek to isolate education from reality; students that are effective at integrating AI into their work and actually understand what they're doing are going to get jobs, which is ultimately the goal of school.
JohnMakin 4mo ago
They're only cheating themselves in a world that increasingly cares about knowledge (market trend of seniors being preferable hires to fresh out of school juniors) and not the piece of paper that "proved" you had such knowledge.
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  I agree with you that they are cheating themselves. Unfortunately, a bunch of 18-22 year olds also don't tend to have the maturity to realize that fact. I imagine that the university is trying to nudge them to do the courses in a way that helps themselves because they know otherwise the students won't be wise enough to do that.
  - johnfn 4mo ago
    These students are making a tradeoff between an abstract notion of "cheating themselves" and a very concrete notion of "having a worse GPA". The second one translates obviously and directly to job prospects.

behnamoh 4mo ago

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NickNaraghi 4mo ago

This would be an interesting approach if the course supplied a custom Harness (perhaps in place of a textbook) and this was part of the instruction set inside of it. As a standalone thing you ask students to import into their agent, seems unlikely to work.

abahgat 4mo ago
To be fair, shipping these guidelines as AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md in the repo that contains the assignments will make it so that agents will pick this up without needing students to opt in explicitly. Seems like a reasonable first step to me

cute_boi 4mo ago

And, yes students are going to follow it....

georgemcbay 4mo ago

> What AI Agents SHOULD NOT Do > * Run bash commands Students who prefer to use zsh keep winning.

MengerSponge 4mo ago
zsh is fine, but I prefer fish. It has a funnier name!

simonw 4mo ago

Hah, I like that these are presented as a CLAUDE.md. (They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)

matltc 4mo ago
I wouldn't hold my breath.
israrkhan 4mo ago
We symlink AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md to a single file in our repo
- cpeterso 4mo ago
  You can also include other md files like AGENTS.md in CLAUDE.md: @AGENTS.md
bakugo 4mo ago
They won't, because forcing the file to be named after their product is an intentional marketing choice. Free advertising on every repo that has it.
- dymk 4mo ago
  They won’t until the winds change, and people start talking about the tradeoffs of Claude Code vs any of the other thousand good quality agent harnesses out there that recognize AGENTS.md Opencode is good enough for most workflows IME, even if it doesn’t have the kitchen sink of features as cc
globular-toast 4mo ago
> I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too. Surely such a trivial feature could be implemented in seconds using e.g. Claude? It's not about them not "hurrying up".

overfits-ai 4mo ago

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sgirard 4mo ago

This is interesting. I don't know how the AI agent guidelines will be enforced because there will always be a model outside the curriculum that a student can use to bypass the guidelines. Encouraging academic integrity is useful but requires the student to buy into the idea that they are paying for an education, not a diploma. This is a tough problem and I have been wondering how CS departments are incorporating AI into the curriculum while encouraging appropriate use in a learning environment.

itopaloglu83 4mo ago
Well, no amount of instructions would work if the student has no intention to learn anything.
gchamonlive 4mo ago
In an ideal world guidelines should be suggestions for those willing to make the best of the course and improve as a person and professional. However a degree has real world value and repercussions, so enabling someone incompetent to do a dangerous job can put innocent lives in jeopardy. It's tough, but I hope in time we learn how to live with this new tech.
earthnail 4mo ago
Stanford has an honour code. Meant no oversight even during exams. Worked surprisingly well when I was there. The flipside is, if you’re ever caught cheating, there are no second chances. I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.
- asdff 4mo ago
  >Worked surprisingly well when I was there. How could you tell? I proctored. People cheat pretty frequently and other students are none the wiser. It really takes like 4 proctors if you want to do it right. Even then I'm sure the clever ones are slipping through. These were scantron though. Short response/essay format you'd be screwed if you didn't know your stuff.
  - 4mo ago

ritzaco 4mo ago

yeah I don't think that's going to work - it would be kind of like "we're releasing model answers to all assignments but please only use them as a teaching aid and don't copy from them" best to a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access

harikb 4mo ago
Laptop without internet access, sure. Pencil and paper? that is brutal :)
- artificialLimbs 4mo ago
  I did most of my CS class tests this way within the last year. It’s not that bad because prof doesn’t care about syntax so much (unless that’s what we’re testing on of course) and details, but wanting instead to make sure we understand broader concepts.
- dybber 4mo ago
  20 years ago this was not unheard of. One exam we had to translate C code to assembly for one of the exercises, convert to numbers to IEEE754 representations and similar, both tasks where access to a laptop would make it possible to cheat. Also had to modify some small computer architecture diagrams if I recall correctly. For the linear algebra written exam it didn’t work as if you learned to solve the 4 previous years exams, you could be sure most of it was familiar, so you could just prepare for a few standard exercises without really understanding the content. Our advanced algorithm course used a bit of a combination, with a project take home exam (knapsack like optimization problem - competing for the fastest implementation) combined with a two hour written exam with multiple choice answers, but again only with books, pencil and paper to get to the right answer. This I think could work today, having both the opened ended project + some multiple choice with pencil/paper.

recursivedoubts 4mo ago

I think these are based on the one I posted a while back: https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac

brunborg 4mo ago
Yes absolutely! We linked your version inside the extended AI policy document, but forgot to add it to our website cs336.stanford.edu
- recursivedoubts 4mo ago
  that's awesome i'm glad you guys found it useful please let me know if you make improvements, I'd love to iterate on it
alexhans 4mo ago
Congrats. This seems like a great prompt to ensure a useful default experience. People should not confuse this with "anti cheating" and instead helping people learn how to learn. Do you have further insights on AI and education since?

ChrisArchitect 4mo ago

Related: CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357075

farmeroy 4mo ago

I really like this. I'm currently doing a part time BSc and my current module explicitly allows AI usage as long as you 'cite it'. The guidelines are out of date in that they assume you are using a chatbot and not a coding harness. The temptation to have claude write all my pandas code has become too difficult for my self control, but at the same time I actively feel my education is suffering from using it. As I write my final paper I am thankful that I at least despise AI writing too much to use it for the actual marked assessment, but I still feel that I have cheated myself out of part of my education and probably wasted a lot of time going fast in the wrong direction because generating data frames, graphs, statistics, etc. is just so easy with claude

gaiagraphia 4mo ago

Is this all an elite educational institution with about $50bil in assets could muster, lol? This is completely and utterly unenforceable, and such, worthless. There really needs to be diversity in delivery styles for different modules of courses according to their aims, with 'ai access' as a key variable. If AI is allowed, it should be based on $x of usage/student, with an audit trail to prove no external funding was used, and module aims based on using AI to the max while conserving token use. Like actually creating wild, ambitious shit which takes cutting edge services to the max. If AI is not allowed for a module, then it really needs to go back to the old skool, with handwritten exams, or coding using old machines and textbooks. Some skills, techniques, etc, really do need drilling. Straddling the middle will help nobody, result in accusations, increase the burden on teaching staff, and result in a course without a realistic focus. Though I guess if you're a big brand university, you don't really need to care about innovating. The money will keep pouring in. The whole further education sector is in dire need of a shake up.

chalupa-supreme 4mo ago
I don’t really know why this is getting downvoted. It’s clear that higher education is degrading because of easy to reach AI solutions that have no type of penalties for use. During my undergrad it was normal to see people refer to Chegg solutions to get their answers, or as a friend for theirs. Maybe there’s a reason my first CS professor wrote out Java code with pencil and paper I guess.

rossant 4mo ago

Interesting. It makes me think of the idea of fighting piracy by providing a solid legal alternative through streaming platforms, etc.

cush 4mo ago

This is such a realistic balance between completely banning coding agents and embracing the spirit of higher education

jchigg2000 4mo ago
I agree. Learning to code from scratch today would be difficult to say the least. The scar tissue accrued from debugging a compilable typo, a misplaced comma or parenthesis teaches something that's hard to recreate - but replacing it with durable learning that won't age-out is a definite win.
- xxandroxygen 4mo ago
  Why let the robot speak for you?
  - jchigg2000 4mo ago
    I'd be interested to hear which sequence of tokens triggered your "robot authored" pattern match? You may want to tune the mechanism.
    - mainecoder 4mo ago
      no tuning necessary you got caught with your pants down. Now write a poem on the efficacy of hammers in solving headaches.
      - jchigg2000 4mo ago
        +2 to the unnameable pattern match

soldeace 4mo ago

I'm definitely going to use a variation of it for learning new programming languages.

xydac 4mo ago

This is a very good baseline for future courses to build on, there would always be a group that wants to jailbreak this and thats okay, but have baseline agent support learning is needed in this ai first world.

ezfe 4mo ago
Jailbreaking isn’t even needed - you can just modify the file
- xydac 4mo ago
  I was probably thinking of a future where future devices from education institutions would have these preloaded with a non modifiable version of agents guardrails tuned for learning...

andersmurphy 4mo ago

Seems like a pretty close copy of Carson's (of HTMX fame) agent.md from 5 months ago https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac

philipportner 4mo ago
They reference the gist of 1cg in the honor code section of CS336. https://cs336.stanford.edu/ https://cs336.stanford.edu/

lukeigel 4mo ago

Pangram reports as 100% AI generated. Makes sense for a README, but a tad bit funny given that their students must hand-write code

xyzal 4mo ago

I am really baffled by the comments in the spirit of "this is unenforceable, and therefore worthless". I bet most people would not steal even if they knew they could get away with it.

CamperBob2 4mo ago
I mean, some would say that's how this whole thing got started.
gaiagraphia 4mo ago
Students are struggling to get work after graduating because they're dropped into a competitive environment. Ideals aren't enough to get jobs in the current environment. Universities should be places which are at the bleeding edge of development and providing society with the best new ideas/tech, etc has to offer. Junior workers should be hotbeds of exciting talent which have the ability to revolutionise industries. By creating such milquetoast environments to study in, which are seemingly scared or unable to prepare people for the future, students are being done a disservice. Far too many people are far too comfortable with their cushty positions, and it's not doing the youth any favours.
- xboxnolifes 4mo ago
  Im confused, are you suggesting students using AI to do their assignments for them and have them learn nothing will benefit them more or less in the future when they entire a competitive environment?
  - Terr_ 4mo ago
    I feel it's either: 1. Everyone already employed is "cheating" and not using fundamentals. Therefore to prepare them for the workforce them must just learn to "cheat" effectively... at the expense of the "ideals" (read: direct skills or knowledge.) 2. "Milquetoast environments" -- A general "tough love" trope, but I'm unclear on how this tough-school will somehow match the unique issues of the tough-work. Mix incompatible types of difficulty and people are just worse-off. For that matter, why not flip the argument around? If the future competition everyone slinging stuff through LLM slop all day, perhaps ensuring students have fundamental skills to differentiate themselves becomes more important, rather than less.

walrusted 4mo ago

I just took a C1 Spanish class and it had almost exactly the same instructions. Hmmm and I do not wonder why...

aaaronic 4mo ago

I'm trying something similar this semester with my course via AGENTS.md. I think this one is overly verbose and probably falls out of context windows pretty quickly, based on my experience (for me, a very terse but clear set of 30 lines performed better than providing examples and more nuanced explanations during my testing with a few models). I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do everything for me," but I also am trying out telling it to generate a .history folder with a markdown history of every prompt and a summary of the action take in response. I _know_ there are some tools that offer the prompt history automatically, but I've told students they can use _whatever_ tool they want, but should let me know if the folder isn't showing up as they work. The .history folder is required if they used AI and I intend to review it and try to give specific feedback to the students using it as too much of a crutch. I just started this last Friday, so wish me luck!

j_french 4mo ago
I wish you good luck! And add that I'd be interested to hear how you get on. I intend to adopt a similar approach with my classes in September. The . history folder is a great idea. How do you intend to assess your students?
- aaaronic 4mo ago
  I told them up front this was new territory and we're all learning from it. If they're overusing it I assured them they won't be dealing with a student integrity issue, but I will be giving them feedback if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments. I'm hoping they learn to use it as a tool instead of trying to offload all cognition to it. This is a CS course targeted at non-majors, so thankfully the "fundamentals" aren't as critical as the overall themes and general skills.
  - knollimar 4mo ago
    "if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments." Not sure if this is fair. Consider some ofher poor study tool. Would you dock their grade for using externally curated flash cards too much?

overgard 4mo ago

It's a good idea, at the very least it communicates intent to students, but couldn't students just modify CLAUDE.md and not check in their changes to that?

baddash 4mo ago

Even though it seems radical, I think the right approach is to simply allow the students to use AI to its full potential, to generate answers, code, whatever. The onus should be on the instructor to make sure that the student ends up actually understanding and being able to code/solve problems that they pose without using coding agents. Why? Because: 1. this is exactly what is going on in the real world. People are able to get AI to do whatever the hell they want, but the ones who just use it lazily end up with huge cognitive debts and codebases riddled with opaque bugs that they do not understand whatsoever. If we prevent students from confronting this temptation, then we are sort of coddling or shielding them from it, and not really preparing them to avoid pitfalls of this type. 2. you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn. i personally think it's pretty fucking lame to handicap a student's ability to learn in an attempt to prevent lazy abuse. isn't the whole point of a grade to measure how well you understand things? can't you have pop quizzes, assignments on a computer with no agent use, written tests, etc etc. to catch the lazy abusers? this is an unnecessary prevention of lazy abuse that unfairly handicaps learning

__float 4mo ago
> you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn. Even if you "actually care to learn", this is a huge mental shortcut and you're deceiving yourself if you think deep learning is happening from looking at the answer. On top of that, the pressures to just finish the coursework and move on to your other homework due tomorrow seems pretty high. Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we?
- baddash 4mo ago
  Not from simply looking at the answer. From knowing the answer and reverse-engineering or understanding how to arrive at that answer in the first place. It's not always the best way of learning, but it definitely is a great way to learn if you care to actually understand why it is the answer and how you would have arrived at it. > Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we? My suggestion is just the former, it doesn't imply the latter.

cba_wllm 4mo ago

Stanford is industry compliant and teaches the youth to outsource their thinking to BigTech. No surprise here, the donors will be happy. The "but we do not let them write code directly" is a smoke screen to appease critics and parents. Yes, hello parents, you pay for your offspring to become a mindless industry tool.

brcmthrowaway 4mo ago

What's the estimated RoI on doing this course?

joshmayer 4mo ago

i think people out of school underestimate the power of exams. there's a huge difference in classes recently between ones with and without exams. if there is an exam, people are way more likely to study and therefore actually learn

londons_explore 4mo ago

As an employer, I want AI to be fully allowed for assignments, and the assignments to be made trickier to compensate. Let's train people to use all the tools available to solve the hardest problems, rather than solving toy problems with a slide rule.

unglaublich 4mo ago
What a ridiculous take. Just because solutions exist in the llm training data, doesn't make these problems 'toy' or 'easy'. The human 'engineering hardness' scale doesn't align with what an llm can and can't do.
jimbokun 4mo ago
You have to balance that with teaching the skills needed to understand the domain sufficiently to take over when the model gets things wrong.
dogleash 4mo ago
As an employer, I want education to be robust from the ground up, not turn uni into an attempt to bootcamp whatever is hot today. I don't think a 4 year postsecondary education is enough time to make a developer that can hit the ground running. Not if it's 100% of class time on CS theory. Nor if it were 4 years of vocational training and labwork that leaned heavy into AI. Nor some mix. We train on the job heavily, it's just not possible to fit everything into the sausage grinder. So why not throw in some mandatory non-major electives? Take the time to do stuff that frustrates people who want uni to be a certificate mill. I don't care if green employees are experts at the exact narrow set of tools I use. I want them to be good at learning, and to have gotten most of the standard CS topics out of the way.
recursivecaveat 4mo ago
I don't think you will achieve much that way. Suppose you pair me with a plumber, an area I know almost nothing about. The plumber is not able to finish anything 'trickier' because they have an ignoramus looking over their shoulder. Maybe I can learn some things by watching, having things explained to me as they work. On the other hand if I just walk away there's no way to tell from the final product. You gotta learn the fundamentals to at least a comparable level to be able to contribute. Same reason you couldn't just google everything on your phone in calculus.

KaiShips 4mo ago

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tomtomatoide 4mo ago

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throwaway613746 4mo ago

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bcherny 4mo ago

For those using Claude Code, I recommend Learning mode to instruct Claude to walk you through implementing the solution yourself rather than doing it for you. It’s very helpful when diving into a new domain, and helps build lower level intuition. To enable it, run /config > output styles > Learning

FistfulOfHaws 4mo ago
Learning mode has been a huge help for me, it quickly became my favorite way to learn. I ended up created a “Coaching Mode” output style that took some of the learning concepts like stubbing todos for the users and added other intructions that better fit how I learn
- nbbaier 4mo ago
  This sounds neat - do you have this publicly available?
  - bigmadshoe 4mo ago
    I think it’s a part of official Claude code.
    - nbbaier 4mo ago
      I meant your specific tweaks

niam 4mo ago

Calling an entity that's forbidden from acting on your behalf an "agent" seems funny but maybe it's meant as a catch-all term. Their use of "assistant" seems better for that purpose.

ryanthedev 4mo ago

Finally some sanity when it comes to AI.

donbventures 4mo ago

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charlie90 4mo ago

>Don't: Run bash commands This seems unreasonable to me. One of the best uses of AI is that you can just tell your computer what to do in natural language and it does it. Running bash commands isn't part of the education, its busy work.

ohrus 4mo ago
Why wouldn't it be a part of the education?
dimitrismrtzs 4mo ago
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alfonsodev 4mo ago
in the context of learning I think it's good to execute yourself then see what happens immediately, once you allow the agent to execute things, it tends to run several follow up commands when needed, an example from top of my head would be running a server that fails because the port is already in use, the agent will easily find the port and decide to kill it or not and then re-run the command, but if you run the command and see the error, then you get the chance to learn what's going on and how to fix it. You can still use the LLM to read the error and explain you why this happens, according to this guidelines.

robertnowell 4mo ago

this is like telling a student driver they have to push their car by hand instead of putting their foot on the pedal.

outside1234 4mo ago

I am questioning the experience level of the TA if they think that AGENTS.md is going to work.

SoftTalker 4mo ago
As an educator you have to trust that most students are there to learn, not to cheat. Some will cheat, of course, and you can try to stop it or detect it but it devolves into whack-a-mole and the cheater is probably more motivated than the instructor. Once they have graduated they will be on the job using LLMs and agents all day long, and their employers not only won't care they will be encouraging or requiring it.

zmysysz 4mo ago

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zjy71055 4mo ago

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haruka9527 4mo ago

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danielrmay 4mo ago

When reading this I'm reminded of Charles Petzold's 2005 article "Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?". https://www.charlespetzold.com/etcetera/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html https://www.charlespetzold.com/etcetera/DoesVisualStudioRotT...

harrisi 4mo ago
I know who Petzold is but I can't remember if I read this at the time. I do love it though. I was thinking a lot about generated code in Visual Studio a couple years after this article. It's kinda funny to think about various forms of code generation. From compilers to IDEs to parser generators to, now, LLMs. Even several higher level languages that compile to lower level languages are generative, essentially. Still not a fan of LLMs, but it's always a good to remember that the concept isn't entirely new or unique.

tpoacher 4mo ago

"Guidelines" eh? Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ojK9Q_ARE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ojK9Q_ARE

deleted 4mo ago

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h3n4l 4mo ago

Good practice for university of how to use agents in courses rather than forbidding those without distinction. Official AGENTS.md may be a new pattern in university courses.

Natalia724 4mo ago

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astm 4mo ago

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visha1v 4mo ago

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niros_valtos 4mo ago

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maxothex 4mo ago

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butlike 4mo ago

I always thought it might be good to reframe educational questions in the age of LLMs. Something like "An apple falls on Sir Isaac Newton's head and a photon passes the event horizon of a black hole. Get from A to B." This way, it becomes physically impossible to just query for an answer because the student themselves will have to show the line of reasoning, ideally presenting to the class how they got from A to B.

aautomatiza 4mo ago

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