With Or Without AI?

Agentic development is transforming computing. Students have asked me: What should I do? Some of them are clearly using AI to complete their assignments—either because they don’t want to do them, or because they are trying to learn how to collaborate with coding agents. Lazy or misguided: either way, this is a bad idea.

Here’s my advice:

1. Don’t use AI to do assignments not designed to be done with AI.
2. Learn how to effectively collaborate with coding agents.
3. Advocate for educational change.

But you will also not learn how to collaborate with a coding agent. That’s less obvious. I’m doing significant projects purely through conversational programming. Agentic development is difficult, educational, and rewarding. But you won’t learn how by one-shotting a pre-AI era computing assignment.

Even if an instructor gives you permission to use AI to complete an assignment, that does not mean it was designed to be done with AI. Most computing educators can’t stop students from using AI. Many realize that it’s a skill students urgently need to learn. Some have decided that allowing AI use on existing assignments accomplishes that goal. But it doesn’t. So don’t use AI here either.

Second, learn how to effectively collaborate with coding agents. It’s difficult, educational, and rewarding. You will need to know how to do this to find an internship next summer and a job when you graduate.

Collaborating effectively with AI takes a lot of practice. You will need to do most of it on your own. Take courses that teach agentic development. But recognize that most of your practice will be outside the classroom. Complete independent projects, and team up with other independent learners.

Finally, advocate for educational change. We need updated assignments, courses, and degrees that teach agentic development. Computing educators may think they can afford to move slowly here. We already have jobs. Changing our courses is hard. Students hate it. We’ll wait a few years to see how this whole AI situation turns out. Then we’ll run some studies and wait for the results. Then we’ll start the slow process of updating our programs.

But you can’t wait. You’re going to graduate soon into a field transformed by agentic development. You need to learn how to collaborate with AI. Computing educators should be teaching you. Maybe we don’t know how to do that yet—this has all happened very fast. But forbidding AI collaboration without teaching it is the worst of both worlds. You’re paying for an education. You deserve one built for your era. Remind us of this, loudly and often.

I’ve addressed this to computing students, but the advice generalizes. If you’re studying writing, design, law, biology, or everything else AI is transforming, the same framework applies. Don’t use AI to complete assignments that weren’t built for it—you’ll learn neither the subject nor the skill. Learn to collaborate with AI on your own, because your field needs people who can. And push your educators to build you a degree that prepares you for your world, not theirs.