[devjab]

Having done the MIT and Harvard CS courses on EDX.org I have to say that any course that doesn’t put you on a GitHub code space with auto-mated tests is a bad course.

I did them because I’m an external examiner for CS students and when I stated I wanted to brush up on all the stuff you learn during your first years, but I was blown away with how good they were. It has been a long time since so maybe they’ve changed.

I’d worry about AI tutors considering how often they get things blatantly wrong. In our internal statistics and analytics on AI assisted programming it’s a very bad option for “junior” programmers. Basically it reduces productivity by quite a lot, it also produces a lot more pull request rejections due to really bad code. On the flip-side, things like co-pilot makes experts in their field of programming sooooo much more efficient. What is really worrying though, is when LLMs get explanations completely wrong. Which means they are teaching the actually engineering wrong, and it can be years before it gets “fixed” if it ever does. I’ve worked in plenty of places where people would never be challenged on wrong knowledge. Often because their co-workers simply didn’t know any better either.

[nottorp]

> In our internal statistics and analytics on AI assisted programming it’s a very bad option for “junior” programmers. Basically it reduces productivity by quite a lot, it also produces a lot more pull request rejections due to really bad code. On the flip-side, things like co-pilot makes experts in their field of programming sooooo much more efficient.

There's been a study already. "AI" assisted beginners learned ... about nothing compared to the control beginners group. I think it was linked here on HN.

A LLM might help if it does not give you code but only answers short questions. Unless it's as good as those support chatbots.

[devjab]

I must not have expressed myself clear enough, sorry English isn’t my first language. What I meant was actually the opppsite or what you say. AI is fancy auto-complete for programmers who know when to ignore it. It’s terrible at answering questions. It will tell you the most amazing things about how computers work. I know it’s not that different from Google programming, probably even more accurate, but the key difference we’ve found is that people tend to trust the AI more than what they find on Google.

[sayonidroy]

we totally agree that AI giving you coding solutions doesn't help. So Edmigo never provides solutions unless explicitly requested. Instead it gives hints to help learners think

[nottorp]

It would get banned from StackOverflow then :)

[mnky9800n]

Yeah but this is really a cottage industry. If companies didn't expect applicants to grind leetcode this ai tutor wouldn't exist. The tutor isn't there to actually teach or innovate education in any way (as the authors claim in another post). It's there to reduce the friction between unemployment and employment.