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AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

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Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#151

Post by alfonsodev »

charlie90 wrote: post #114

>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.

in the context of learning I think it's good to execute yourself then see what happens immediately, once you allow the agent to execute things, it tends to run several follow up commands when needed, an example from top of my head would be running a server that fails because the port is already in use, the agent will easily find the port and decide to kill it or not and then re-run the command, but if you run the command and see the error, then you get the chance to learn what's going on and how to fix it. You can still use the LLM to read the error and explain you why this happens, according to this guidelines.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#153

Post by robryan »

ritzaco wrote: 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…

Assignments the agent is bad at seems like a losing battle. Just need to base the mark off the in person test, maybe keep 20-30% to encourage people to still do the assignments. Some will cheat but it will just be hurting them for the test.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#154

Post by minitoar »

brabel wrote: post #149
thaumasiotes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> You're free to apply the particle "up" to pretty much any English verb if you want the semantics that it provides. I have been speaking English for 20 years but it's my second language. I don't think the semantics of "up" matters when I try to understand phrasal verbs like "turn up". I don't see anything about "up" (as in a direction) in "turn up" or "show up" when it means "to appear" or "to be discovered"... wher…

It can also mean damage (blow up, tear up) or completeness (clean up, drink up).

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#155

Post by knollimar »

aaaronic wrote: post #104
j_french wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you good luck! And add that I'd be interested to hear how you get on. I intend to adopt a similar approach with my classes in September. The . history folder is a great idea. How do you intend to assess your students?

I told them up front this was new territory and we're all learning from it. If they're overusing it I assured them they won't be dealing with a student integrity issue, but I will be giving them feedback if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments. I'm hoping they learn to use it as a tool instead of trying to offload all cognition to it. Th…

"if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments."

Not sure if this is fair. Consider some ofher poor study tool. Would you dock their grade for using externally curated flash cards too much?

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#156

Post by i_am_proteus »

asdff wrote: post #34
earthnail wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanford has an honour code. Meant no oversight even during exams. Worked surprisingly well when I was there. The flipside is, if you’re ever caught cheating, there are no second chances. I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.

>Worked surprisingly well when I was there. How could you tell? I proctored. People cheat pretty frequently and other students are none the wiser. It really takes like 4 proctors if you want to do it right. Even then I'm sure the clever ones are slipping through. These were scantron though. Short response/essay format you'd be screwed if you didn't know your stuff.

Once upon a time. The modern cheating student does the following:

- Quick cell phone photograph of the page, phone placed in lap

- OCR + AI = answer

- Glance down, copy

- Repeat

For a more surreptitious variant, use the front-facing camera against the bottom of the page, then flip the page. Cell phone can remain in lap.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#157

Post by siddboots »

brabel wrote: post #149
thaumasiotes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> You're free to apply the particle "up" to pretty much any English verb if you want the semantics that it provides. I have been speaking English for 20 years but it's my second language. I don't think the semantics of "up" matters when I try to understand phrasal verbs like "turn up". I don't see anything about "up" (as in a direction) in "turn up" or "show up" when it means "to appear" or "to be discovered"... wher…

“Fed up” as a phrase comes from feeding livestock up to their fill. It’s very similar to how you would say “filled up”. So the upness comes from raising the level up to the limit.

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#158

Post by thaumasiotes »

brabel wrote: post #149
thaumasiotes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> You're free to apply the particle "up" to pretty much any English verb if you want the semantics that it provides. I have been speaking English for 20 years but it's my second language. I don't think the semantics of "up" matters when I try to understand phrasal verbs like "turn up". I don't see anything about "up" (as in a direction) in "turn up" or "show up" when it means "to appear" or "to be discovered"... wher…

> I don't think the semantics of "up" matters when I try to understand phrasal verbs like "turn up".

They don't, but they matter a lot when you're coining a new phrasal verb!

(They still matter a little for verbs that already exist. You might see a verb mutate from using one particle to using a different one, but that would probably take hundreds of years.)

Re: AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

#159

Post by weird-eye-issue »

aaaronic wrote: post #60

I'm trying something similar this semester with my course via AGENTS.md. I think this one is overly verbose and probably falls out of context windows pretty quickly, based on my experience (for me, a very terse but clear set of 30 lines performed better than providing examples and more nuanced explanations during my testing with a few models). I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do…

This is not long at all compared to what is actually being used in production by my agents and others like Claude Code...
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