>Don't: Run bash commands This seems unreasonable to me. One of the best uses of AI is that you can just tell your computer what to do in natural language and it does it. Running bash commands isn't part of the education, its busy work.
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AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
131–140 of 176 posts
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
worth clarifying "chat" is actually (linguistically) completely separate from a shorthand for ChatGPT. Livestreamers (e.g. on twitch/youtube) often talk to "chat", the people watching. Visually, they're just narrating actions etc to a 3rd party who is not present. This has leaked into (some) younger people's vocabulary. A particular example is saying "Chat is this real?" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chat-is-this-re…
Ha, I have a 16 year old who yells "chat" often enough when online gaming to be familiar with that use. I'm positive these students did use an LLM to get the help instead of crowdsourcing, but it is an interesting linguistic overlap. And while I'm on my "old man" soapbox -- "look it up" and "search for it" somehow became "search it up" with the young people. I corrected my son for years before I started hearing colle…
> "look it up" and "search for it" somehow became "search it up" with the young people
It wouldn't actually be necessary for the phrase "look it up" to exist for this to happen. You're free to apply the particle "up" to pretty much any English verb if you want the semantics that it provides. Compare rustle up, turn up, etc.
You might also want to take note of the episode of Kim Possible where Ron is unsatisfied with the performance of an actor studying to play him, and tells the actor to "Ron it up".
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same issue as with cliffnotes. Easy way out means the easy way will be taken. Unless, you actually design a decent assignment or exam. In person essays or exams, heavily weighted, you are simply screwed if you didn't study the old fashioned way. A couple of my more serious classes were like this: no homework, no projects, entire grade based on 3 exams. That put the fear of whatever diety you subscribe to into you lik…
3 tests was already better than the traditional Spanish university class: 1 exam. which is probably written by the department head, not your teacher, and he isn't in any way interested in a high pass rate. Failing 90% of the class might even be positive for them. At that point classes aren't even important: You purchase the tests from the last 10 years, and then you have a prayer of knowing what the bar might be this…
> Teaching, fairness and measuring student performance might seem like similar goals
What? Teaching and measurement are very different goals. The whole point of teaching is to mess with measurements.
This automatically means, by the way, that a huge conflict of interest exists whenever the same party is supposed to be responsible for both instruction and measurement. That's why assessment in a traditional Spanish university is out of the hands of the professor. We should aspire to be more like them.
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
#134Even though it seems radical, I think the right approach is to simply allow the students to use AI to its full potential, to generate answers, code, whatever. The onus should be on the instructor to make sure that the student ends up actually understanding and being able to code/solve problems that they pose without using coding agents. Why? Because: 1. this is exactly what is going on in the real world. People are a…
Stanford is a research university. The student should have full responsibility for learning outcomes. The university will provide support and opportunities to the extent its resources allow, but it's up to the student to choose if they want to take advantage of that. Those who need a more guided approach to learning can always go to teaching-oriented universities or find a personal tutor.
That's a major reason why employers have traditionally valued degrees from research universities, even if they are not particularly highly ranked. Being able to thrive in an environment like that shows a degree of independence and initiative.
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Students are struggling to get work after graduating because they're dropped into a competitive environment. Ideals aren't enough to get jobs in the current environment. Universities should be places which are at the bleeding edge of development and providing society with the best new ideas/tech, etc has to offer. Junior workers should be hotbeds of exciting talent which have the ability to revolutionise industries.…
Im confused, are you suggesting students using AI to do their assignments for them and have them learn nothing will benefit them more or less in the future when they entire a competitive environment?
I feel it's either:
1. Everyone already employed is "cheating" and not using fundamentals. Therefore to prepare them for the workforce them must just learn to "cheat" effectively... at the expense of the "ideals" (read: direct skills or knowledge.)
2. "Milquetoast environments" -- A general "tough love" trope, but I'm unclear on how this tough-school will somehow match the unique issues of the tough-work. Mix incompatible types of difficulty and people are just worse-off.
For that matter, why not flip the argument around? If the future competition everyone slinging stuff through LLM slop all day, perhaps ensuring students have fundamental skills to differentiate themselves becomes more important, rather than less.
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you that they are cheating themselves. Unfortunately, a bunch of 18-22 year olds also don't tend to have the maturity to realize that fact. I imagine that the university is trying to nudge them to do the courses in a way that helps themselves because they know otherwise the students won't be wise enough to do that.
These students are making a tradeoff between an abstract notion of "cheating themselves" and a very concrete notion of "having a worse GPA". The second one translates obviously and directly to job prospects.
Not really. If they got admitted to Stanford to begin with, they are smart enough to succeed if they put in the work. So what they are actually trading off against is "I don't want to do the work", which is far less defensible than your reading of the situation.
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Learning to code from scratch today would be difficult to say the least. The scar tissue accrued from debugging a compilable typo, a misplaced comma or parenthesis teaches something that's hard to recreate - but replacing it with durable learning that won't age-out is a definite win.
Why let the robot speak for you?
I'd be interested to hear which sequence of tokens triggered your "robot authored" pattern match? You may want to tune the mechanism.
Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
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