I’m on the middle of my CS Degree, and seems that every assignment I need to use a LLM, or is because short deadlines or the people in your group use LLM and without critical thinking of it. Some teachers seems to be fine with that, however my experience is that we make complex essays and complex class diagrams, a lot of code, however no one seems to understand or learn form what they are making and wend defending their work only can do it by reading a resume the LLM made, that make me hopeless and unmotivated. I what is yours experience and opinions on this matter?
P.S. Sorry for any grammar error with English, is not my main language. About AI I am not fully against AI. The Local LLM installed on my machine is helpful for a few things, but the amount that we are using on CS seems too much.
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The main problem is how most education isn’t meant to actually teach you, just to grind you through a conveyor belt and, if you don’t fail, reward you with a diploma. It really fucking sucks and, in that regard, most places haven’t changed in the past 40 years.
Now, regarding LLMs, try to do stuff yourself whenever possible. As humans, we love cutting corners (I certainly did that during my uni time, 13y ago). The sheer volume of assignments isn’t helping, so at least try to pick one or two that are more interesting, or that you believe to be more important for you to actually know, and do them without LLM aid.
Remember, every skill - programming, understanding what the fuck the assignment wants you to do, math - works like muscles: you HAVE to use it in order to get good. Gotta think like an athlete, train (study) every day. It is exhausting, it makes you want to do anything other than that, but you have to power thru if you don’t want to use LLM as a crutch for the rest of your life
I graduated with a bachelor’s in computer science about 10 years ago.
I have to really impress upon you how important it is that you try to understand what you’re doing. If you feel hopeless because nobody around you seems to care then that’s a good sign that you have the natural curiosity that is still necessary for this work. Always try to understand as much as you can, even if it’s harder than what your classmates are doing.
This problem existed in a certain fashion when I was in school, though I admit you have it harder than I had it. Many of my classmates wanted their hand held through every single assignment and then were shocked their CS degree didn’t get them an immediate job after they copied everything directly from StackOverflow for four years. If I’m interviewing a new hire the main thing I’m assessing is if they seem capable and willing to learn. I don’t need someone who can take my questions and plug them into an LLM for me.
Foster a curiosity about how things work and why things are done a certain way, and you may not only improve your career prospects but also find school to be less demoralizing.
I promise you that you dont need to use an LLM at all in your comp sci degree. None of it is really that complicated or tough. Its hard because you dont understand it. Sit down and take the time to go through it and for the rest of your life you will “get it”
Hi there. I JUST finished my CS degree. ChatGPT-2 came out while I was in year 1.
I have not used LLM in a single assignment or project. I have had group projects where my groupmates used AI for coding, writing and researching, but my own goal is always to learn, so I refused to use it. If no one understands the code but you do, you have the advantage.
If you’re having problems with deadlines, just do them earlier then. I often start assignments within 2 days after they were posted. There’s always plenty of buffer time. It’s about growing a good habit.
You taking these courses at a very strange time in computer science. As somebody that has mixed feelings on LLM’s and ML in general, I implore you to focus on understanding the real crux of the content in your courses.
Even if LLM’s have a place in the future world and even if they supplant much of writing code, we will soon be facing a big shortage of people who understand what the hell is going on. Be one of those people and you will flourish.
It is like taking calculus and having a computer do all your derivation and integration. That’s not the point. The point is understanding what makes them so neat and useful.
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I took programming classes before the LLM craze, and I just want to say I felt similarly about people not learning from or understanding what they made. A lot of my classmates were happy to be led by the hand through every assignment or project, but would completely fall apart when asked to make their own solutions.
Part of it I think was motivation. The people who were into programming because computers were their passion, or because they liked building things did better. A lot of people were just taking the class in hopes to get a high-paying job, and those didn’t do great even if they did go on to get a degree.
It’s a shame because I believe the true wonder of computer programming is the open-ended ability to solve any problem. You don’t have to be steered in a particular direction, and if you have an idea that you follow through on you can achieve your goal in any number of ways.
I think LLMs are attractive to students because it points them in a direction they can follow without having to think about it, unfortunately to the detriment of personal growth. They appear all over the place in business because your boss is never going to assign enough time and budget for a project, and the perceived velocity or cost of LLM-driven development is cheaper than hiring enough developers.
In my opinion, if you’re in the middle of your degree then this is the exact time you should be avoiding LLMs to learn. Presumably you have access to your professors, mentors, or tutors when you need to understand something, and all of that goes away after graduation.
Using an LLM to do your work is like saying “I’m a great programmer because my friend writes all my code.”
Having an LLM do anyone’s job for them is a bit of a cartoon example. There are very few jobs it can do in its entirety. It’s about to what degree one uses it to help with their work. Nothing wrong with having assistance for as long as it actually helps you do your job better. I’ve had one solve multiple technical problems/questions for me but I still need to do the work myself because an LLM can’t even turn a wrench.
If I were in school now and told to use an LLM, I’d feel cheated and be infuriated. People go to school and get a degree in literature or history of art, and they get hired on as audit analysts or marketing or whatever. They study for the sake of studying. Even if the end state of computer science degree is using LLM for work, learning the underlying principles is the entire point of going to school for it.
I do think learning how to use MCP and skills and prompts properly is really useful (it’s the difference between 30 pages of bullshit and a 3 page pinpoint report) But it’s a drop in the bucket.
Sorry I have no comment on your main question, but as a non native English speaker and writer, your English is good. You’re better at getting the point across clearly than me lol.
I think you’re right to feel a bit cheated. They’re supposed to be teaching you computer science, not “prompt engineering.”
My conclusion has been to pursue the blue ocean strategy — don’t go where everyone else is going. Find the calm blue ocean where no one else is and stake your claim there. If you’re just one of billions of prompt engineers, you don’t have any in-demand skills. If you actually learn real computer science, you’ll have an increasingly rare skill and will be there when the LLMs fail to work and will know how to fix it (if it can be fixed).
i think this is flawed, tbh. it’s true that up until this year, llms did not make people any faster at coding, or more able to tackle challenges outside their skillset. but that has changed, and if you’re in uni now, you’re not trying to be useful today, you’re trying to be useful 4-5 years from now. it’s wildly irresponsible imo to gamble your future on llms failing when the trend has been the exact opposite.
you also shouldn’t gamble your future on llms being easily available forever. but you don’t have to do either.
the real thing that matters isn’t line-by-line coding ability, it’s a deep understanding of technology. that’s what you should be focusing on. it cuts juniors deep (and by definition, most coders at uni are juniors) because they tend to be the group that focuses the most on the superficial aspects of coding and not on the underlying reasons and technologies, but that focus was always wrong, it just used to be easier to get away with being wrong.
focus on being someone who understands systems and builds things, whether or not you have an ai to help you. programming is not an abstract field judged arbitrarily by how well your peers like you, at the end of the day it’s very results-driven. we build real things, and it matters more what you can build than how you do it. and what you can build directly depends on your understanding of technology, regardless of how much ai is being used at building it. it does not matter if your c++ is 10% more idiomatic or 20% less llm-coded than that of your peers, what matters is if you managed to solve the problem.
even if we assume llms will be more capable in the future, not less, that direction will help you, because most non-coders don’t know what the hell to ask an llm to get something done. they also didn’t know where to start before llms were a thing. it’s your willingness to learn and your understanding of where to go, what to reach for, that sets you apart from an mba with a claude subscription, not your ability to dance around the borrow checker.
In the last 24 hours a vibe coded game launcher has leaked personal information and Outlook is down worldwide (likely due to some LLM-generated flaw).
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said on X around 0300 GMT, without saying when service was expected to be back to normal.
When was the last time Outlook was down for a day? What are they going to do to fix it after offshoring their brain to Copilot? “Please, Copilot, unfuck Outlook! 😢”
Every day we hear about an LLM that deleted data for no apparent reason.
If this is the future, then the future is Idiocracy.
And the point of university isn’t to prepare prompt engineers. It’s to prepare students to make contributions to the advancement of arts and sciences.
LLMs take the argument of “I have a calculator why do I need to learn math?” to the extreme where we’re now burning math textbooks and blindly obeying the calculator when it says to eat one rock a day.
Sounds bad. The whole point of university is higher inquiry and learning - not spitting out assignments or busywork.
If LLMs would have been a thing in my time, I probably wouldn’t have failed Math and gotten an IT degree instead. But they weren’t, so I changed my field of study, which I am very happy about in hindsight. But it is kind of scary, isn’t it? I have this one guy in the team who seems to be dependent on LLMs, it’s like talking to a robot.
You probably wouldn’t have failed Math, but you probably wouldn’t have learned it either!
Yes, of course not. I also find it very wrong to use LLMs in order to obtain a degree. But growing up is hard and I had a lot of stuff I my mind during my 20s, not sure I could have resisted. Especially in a climate like OP describes it. I am glad I have been teached critical thinking and auto didactic learning, but I worry for the upcoming generation.
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Well out here in the work-world you are required to use an llm. You have to keep your token count up, and they even monitor your prompts. So it is good practice for today’s work environment.
