Post #857949

2026-03-28 00:16 UTC

A student in my Ruckus course said they gave the project to an AI afterwards as an experiment and it simply did the entire project (passing all tests) and even wrote an overview of its decision making process. I looked at the resulting code and the overview. It&#39;s not entirely to my liking, but I&#39;d probably give it a B+. I&#39;m not even quite sure what to make of all of this except to wonder if continuing education in CS is completely dead at this point.

Replies (5)

@bkim@mastodon.social 2026-03-28 01:09

@dabeaz let's say that you could make money by playing Untitled Goose Game. You could just start playing it and having a lot of fun while completing missions, being a terrible goose, and discovering most secrets by yourself. After a long (and uneven) streak of terror, you'd be rewarded and pumped for the next open world avian simulation. Or you could get a walkthrough and start completing an objective after another, even the secret ones. You could watch a charming streamer play, instead. (...)

Open ##2098588
@mdione@en.osm.town 2026-03-28 07:48

@dabeaz when I was explaining something to a lab full of YA having unlimited internet for thenfirst time in their lives I always started by warning them that whatever I was explaining was for their own good, but theybwere free to learn these things by themselves or fail. At this point I think one would only teach to the people who actually wants to learn.

Open ##2098594
@phf@dmv.community 2026-03-28 07:53

@dabeaz Sorry to be a stickler but "it" did nothing but roll dice and traverse graphs. Also "it" doesn't "learn" from doing the project. It "learned" in an entirely different and much poorer sense and was able to regurgitate in a convincing enough manner. I keep thinking that it's important to be clear about these things. But that all said, I agree that most people will probably not learn something if they have a button they can push instead and PRETEND that they'll get back to reading it tomorrow but they need it in production today.

Open ##2098596
@datenwolf@chaos.social 2026-03-28 13:10

@dabeaz It's not dead. LLMs are trained by the corpus of source code out there. Much of it is of mediocre quality. Worse many popular frameworks don't implement to the full extent of the specification of the underlying system APIs (case in point: OpenGl render context management, spec says, it's tied to surface pixel format. Tutorials and frameworks out there misattributed it to windows. So now every LLM out there produces OpenGL context management code that's fundamentally broken).

Open ##2098601
@lmstevens2529@mathstodon.xyz 2026-03-29 23:13

@dabeaz I gave instructions to Google ai it took my C sharp algorithm turned it into a python algorithm basically. I gave instructions to ai google lol. BS Computer Science 1994 SLU. Computers basically need still to be prompted

Open ##2098603