I don't get this post. It says software is getting worse, and then... gives a handful of anecdotal evidence. That could have been done at any point in the life of the software industry, including in the pre-agentic era. So the assertion behind the post doesn't really have any weight to it. Is there any actual, respectable evidence that software is actually getting worse? Also, what would worse even mean really? More buggy? Less reliable? Less creative, flexible?
i'm working on something similar, not a full agent harness but an agentic workflow app so i can learn too. if you're interested in sharing it would be awesome to take a look. i can share my project too!
Not from simply looking at the answer. From knowing the answer and reverse-engineering or understanding how to arrive at that answer in the first place. It's not always the best way of learning, but it definitely is a great way to learn if you care to actually understand why it is the answer and how you would have arrived at it.
> Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we?
My suggestion is just the former, it doesn't imply the latter.
Even 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 able to get AI to do whatever the hell they want, but the ones who just use it lazily end up with huge cognitive debts and codebases riddled with opaque bugs that they do not understand whatsoever. If we prevent students from confronting this temptation, then we are sort of coddling or shielding them from it, and not really preparing them to avoid pitfalls of this type.
2. you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn. i personally think it's pretty fucking lame to handicap a student's ability to learn in an attempt to prevent lazy abuse. isn't the whole point of a grade to measure how well you understand things? can't you have pop quizzes, assignments on a computer with no agent use, written tests, etc etc. to catch the lazy abusers? this is an unnecessary prevention of lazy abuse that unfairly handicaps learning
I'm not talking about AI technology we use as the next generation of tooling. I am talking about new, possibly multiple intelligent species emerging which are superior to humanity.