Mihail Eric has two places to test his answer. He teaches The Modern Software Developer at Stanford and leads AI at Monaco, where his colleagues use coding agents to ship software and investigate outages. I asked him to take us through the syllabus, then tell us which parts survived contact with his own engineering team.
The first run of CS146S had nine assignments and a capstone. In one exercise, students ran an AI code reviewer on a repo and evaluated its feedback. By the next run, Mihail figured students could one-shot a lot of those exercises. When he asked a room of Stanford sophomores and juniors how they coded, everyone he surveyed was already using an agent.
So this time, part of the homework is contributing to an open-source project. The person who maintains the repo reviews the student’s patch. I like what that does to the assignment. You can ask an agent to implement a feature in an afternoon. You still have to find out whether the maintainer wants it, why the code behaves the way it does, and what else your patch might break. That conversation is also how a junior engineer gets to learn from a senior one.
There’s an exercise in the episode you can borrow for your next PR. Geoffrey Litt’s explain-diff skill turns a change into a visual walkthrough, then quizzes you about it. Try it on a patch your agent just wrote. Which question do you have to reopen the code to answer? Watch the discussion.
Source: Latent Space — Read the full article on the original site ↗