A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
I disagree. Certainly for systems architecture you may need a ‘good’ engineer, but you really don’t need to hire someone to automate the routine clicks you are doing every day. Oh look I have to pull and move the same data everyday, can’t I write a python script for that? Yes. And for many who are not programmers, an LLM can easily do that for you, and works just as well as that junior dev who is overloaded and can’t be bothered to do that for you.
You have the right disagree, without being right about it. That “junior dev” mindset is PR speak for “reasons to pay them less”. Actual developers have acquired skills as hobbyists long before entering a job, and will self-train continuously on the job. That’s how you get senior developers. Using a slop bot to generate code is something that 1) an actually skilled dev wouldn’t do because they have zero time gain from it, and 2) it will mean you keep dumb people dumb, never having them learn skills as time passes. Non-deterministic coding assistants are for gullible people who want to license-launder other people’s code and/or wouldn’t ever be able to create any proper software. And yes, that includes people who suffer from brain deterioration after having once been decent devs.