alt Hacker NewsAI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford
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Seems like a pretty close copy of Carson's (of HTMX fame) agent.md from 5 months ago
https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like
This would be an interesting approach if the course supplied a custom Harness (perhaps in place of a textbook) and this was part of the instruction set inside of it. As a standalone thing you ask students to import into their agent, seems unlikely to work.
Hah, I like that these are presented as a CLAUDE.md.
(They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)
This is such a realistic balance between completely banning coding agents and embracing the spirit of higher education
This is interesting. I don't know how the AI agent guidelines will be enforced because there will always be a model outside the curriculum that a student can use to bypass the guidelines. Encouraging academic integrity is useful but requires the student to buy into the idea that they are paying for an education, not a diploma. This is a tough problem and I have been wondering how CS departments are incorporating AI into the curriculum while encouraging appropriate use in a learning environment.
It's a good idea, at the very least it communicates intent to students, but couldn't students just modify CLAUDE.md and not check in their changes to that?
As an employer, I want AI to be fully allowed for assignments, and the assignments to be made trickier to compensate.
Let's train people to use all the tools available to solve the hardest problems, rather than solving toy problems with a slide rule.
i think people out of school underestimate the power of exams. there's a huge difference in classes recently between ones with and without exams. if there is an exam, people are way more likely to study and therefore actually learn
This is a very good baseline for future courses to build on, there would always be a group that wants to jailbreak this and thats okay, but have baseline agent support learning is needed in this ai first world.
I think these are based on the one I posted a while back:
https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac
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 just took a C1 Spanish class and it had almost exactly the same instructions. Hmmm and I do not wonder why...
yeah I don't think that's going to work - it would be kind of like "we're releasing model answers to all assignments but please only use them as a teaching aid and don't copy from them"
best to
a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions
b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access
Interesting. It makes me think of the idea of fighting piracy by providing a solid legal alternative through streaming platforms, etc.
> What AI Agents SHOULD NOT Do
> * Run bash commands
Students who prefer to use zsh keep winning.
I'm definitely going to use a variation of it for learning new programming languages.
What's the estimated RoI on doing this course?
Is this all an elite educational institution with about $50bil in assets could muster, lol? This is completely and utterly unenforceable, and such, worthless.
There really needs to be diversity in delivery styles for different modules of courses according to their aims, with 'ai access' as a key variable.
If AI is allowed, it should be based on $x of usage/student, with an audit trail to prove no external funding was used, and module aims based on using AI to the max while conserving token use. Like actually creating wild, ambitious shit which takes cutting edge services to the max.
If AI is not allowed for a module, then it really needs to go back to the old skool, with handwritten exams, or coding using old machines and textbooks. Some skills, techniques, etc, really do need drilling.
Straddling the middle will help nobody, result in accusations, increase the burden on teaching staff, and result in a course without a realistic focus.
Though I guess if you're a big brand university, you don't really need to care about innovating. The money will keep pouring in. The whole further education sector is in dire need of a shake up.
I really like this. I'm currently doing a part time BSc and my current module explicitly allows AI usage as long as you 'cite it'. The guidelines are out of date in that they assume you are using a chatbot and not a coding harness. The temptation to have claude write all my pandas code has become too difficult for my self control, but at the same time I actively feel my education is suffering from using it. As I write my final paper I am thankful that I at least despise AI writing too much to use it for the actual marked assessment, but I still feel that I have cheated myself out of part of my education and probably wasted a lot of time going fast in the wrong direction because generating data frames, graphs, statistics, etc. is just so easy with claude
I am really baffled by the comments in the spirit of "this is unenforceable, and therefore worthless".
I bet most people would not steal even if they knew they could get away with it.
And, yes students are going to follow it....
This is ridiculous. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle. This is the equivalent of "you wouldn't download a car". (Yes, we would.)
The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students.
Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines.
More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.
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I always wonder why there is such course. Using agent ai coding tool is trivial.
Pangram reports as 100% AI generated. Makes sense for a README, but a tad bit funny given that their students must hand-write code
Stanford is industry compliant and teaches the youth to outsource their thinking to BigTech. No surprise here, the donors will be happy.
The "but we do not let them write code directly" is a smoke screen to appease critics and parents. Yes, hello parents, you pay for your offspring to become a mindless industry tool.
I'm trying something similar this semester with my course via AGENTS.md. I think this one is overly verbose and probably falls out of context windows pretty quickly, based on my experience (for me, a very terse but clear set of 30 lines performed better than providing examples and more nuanced explanations during my testing with a few models).
I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do everything for me," but I also am trying out telling it to generate a .history folder with a markdown history of every prompt and a summary of the action take in response.
I _know_ there are some tools that offer the prompt history automatically, but I've told students they can use _whatever_ tool they want, but should let me know if the folder isn't showing up as they work.
The .history folder is required if they used AI and I intend to review it and try to give specific feedback to the students using it as too much of a crutch.
I just started this last Friday, so wish me luck!