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AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

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11–20 of 176 posts

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#12
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.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#13
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

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#14

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

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".

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#15
post #4

good intention but useless let's be real

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.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#17
post #13

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 availabl…

Laptop without internet access, sure. Pencil and paper? that is brutal :)

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#19

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

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.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#20
post #10

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.)

We symlink AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md to a single file in our repo
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