AI is destroying my CS degree

tcdent

> It's been a huge learning curve. 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.

1970-01-01

The double standard of "YES WE'RE USING AI BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD!" needs to be called out much more. It isn't some forbidden fruit.

stuartjohnson12

Being able to write a coherent critique that stays practical and doesn't stray into bombastic moralisation or interpersonal frustration is a rare skill that speaks well to your communication skill and taste. I think you will do just fine in a world of AI in engineering.

johsole

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.

moomin

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.

sh-run

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.

zamadatix

I decided to finally get a CS degree at juuuust the right time (well, for my personal reasons of "love of the game" at least - individual interests may vary), having wrapped up ~2 years ago. 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.

laserbeam

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.

seki285

Why are more people (bots?) using bearblog. The landing page claims it's fast and privacy focused, but it offers so little... I could recreate it myself in a day so why aren't people running their own blogs, especially in CS where you could learn something doing it. 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.

BeetleB

Since you are (likely) young - here's a tip when writing such articles: Provide examples. It's hard for readers to gauge whether you're complaints are legitimate or overreactions.

dahart

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.

Aurornis

This sounds awful, but the culprit is the terrible faculty at this institution: > 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.

OhMeadhbh

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.

1239715

This is a good article. AI just introduces new bureaucracy, workloads, useless discussions and is a hindrance. 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.

Kaethar

The uni I recently graduated is also very confused regarding what to do... Things have converged towards less hands on assignments and more theoretical exams, something I know for sure I would've hated during my studies. 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.

Aozora7

That seems like a normal academia dysfunction, AI is just another thing they are failing to adapt to. I graduated 10 years ago and on the job I had to unlearn most of what I learned from the Java course, for example. I haven't seen a better example of "those who can't do, teach" than CS professors.

digitalsushi

Wesley Crusher was kidnapped away to a planet with no children. Their bodies were decaying but their technology was superior to the Federation's so they needed to steal other people's kids. 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.

cush

It’s probably time students shift further away from studying computer science and more toward software engineering. It provides real skills that are still relevant in the AI era. Less memorizing algorithms, more SDLC, team management, economics, and working with real customers on their requirements.

Avicebron

Isn't having something that can solve general problems based on prior art without the requisite effort in learning the prior art completely antithetical to education in general? Not saying they aren't useful tools, but asking a an AI to write bubble sort isn't learning bubble sort? The point was never to write bubbles sort it was to learn how and why.

Surac

if you only do CS for the job or the money you where wrong from the beginning. I do this for 45 years now and every year ther was a horror story how now tech will change everything. You have to empbrace the change and have fun in adapting. CS is nothing to sleep on. If you only do it for the money do something else.