MIT Missing Semester 2026

There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own.

I did take one of the MIT intro CS MOOCs at one point for kicks. Very good. But it was more or less learn Python on your own if you don't already know it (or how to program more broadly). That doesn't really happen in a lot of other disciplines other than some areas of the arts.

It's interesting to see that MIT is still like this. Canonically, there were no classes that taught programming per se: if you needed that, there were (often volunteer-taught) courses over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, that would attempt to fill the gap - but you were still expected to pick it up on your own. I taught the Caffeinated Crash Course in C way back when. Good times.

I always thought this practical side of development was missing in a CS or engineering curriculum. This is awesome.

For similar reasons I think arts and humanities students should take marketing and business courses.

Link to the About page that clearly describes the effort and rationale.

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/

very useful, took me couple months brute forcing to grasp the know hows because my school doesn't teach it. glad to see a course for it now getting out there

Anyone know how/if this differs from the 2020 one?

Edit: Nvm, they comment on it. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/development-environment/

There should be something like this available for any student at University, regardless of field. Perhaps less geared towards programming tasks but basic computing productivity.

If you're interested, see also https://bernsteinbear.com/isdt/ by me and Tom

Awesome course and I encourage everyone to check out the previous iteration (and the corresponding discussions on HN)

Conspicuously missing is a direct mention of AI tools. Is MIT, like others, side-stepping the use of AI by students to (help them) complete homework assignments and projects?