AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

echelon

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.

xiaoyu2006

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

mi_lk

good intention but useless let's be real

ohmahjong

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

NickNaraghi

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.

cute_boi

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

georgemcbay

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

simonw

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.)

sgirard

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.

ritzaco

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

recursivedoubts

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

ChrisArchitect

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

farmeroy

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

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.

rossant

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

cush

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

soldeace

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

xydac

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.

andersmurphy

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

lukeigel

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