Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels are unveiling new guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels are unveiling new guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom.
Dude, I use LLMs daily as a developer. There’s practically nothing about using them that can’t be taught in like an hour once you’re an adult. You definitely don’t need to develop a dependency on them in grade school.
You should meet my coworkers. They are terrible at using it and most of them spend 5k/mo on it. We have access to 4 different AI tools, and they all insist on using the worst (Devin’s web UI, think ChatGPT but it does coding). They don’t even compile their code before posting PRs. The web UI Devin can’t compile it cause it runs on Linux and the ancient legacy app we are on is windows only (COM+).
I strongly dislike AI, but have to use it. if I am forced to use it, I will use it efficiently and effectively.
I’m setting up learning sessions on how to use terminal based AI like Claude code, OMP, etc. cause they are so obnoxious with such a terrible tool.
I hate having to teach these training sessions and don’t want to get labeled as the “ai guy” but like if you are going to destroy the world, you might as well produce something a little bit better than pure slop. Have some self respect and some standards.
Sorry for the rant. It’s been bothering me and I wanted to get it out there.
No worries. Yeah, I have been a reluctant adopter of the technology. I honestly didn’t really buy much of the hype until Claude code and some of the better models came along.
Even frontier models screw up on their first, second, and even third tries at times. The insight that Anthropic really had was realizing that they needed to be allowed to chat with themselves in a loop, fail in a loop, and that they’re much better if you apply objective standards to the projects (things like unit tests of course, but also integration tests, static code analysis, etc).
The harness is really the thing. Even OpenCode in my experience can produce things that are fairly decent.
That’s where I think both initial implementations of code helpers (i.e., a vanilla “chat box” with “tools”, and “agentic workflows” that try to one-shot everything) that were made in the initial round of “doing AI” are effectively useless garbage that should be buried like radioactive waste.
If you don’t prod it, Claude will also spit out worthless crap that doesn’t work at all too. The key is to add all of the plumbing that reasonable projects have (code formatters, linters, etc. etc. forever) and to add gating so that Claude can cycle away getting it wrong and then correcting itself until it gets it right.
EDIT: More relatedly to this thread, I don’t think I would have any problem with some type of high school elective course where kids could use claude code or something like it to try to write some software. It’s pretty likely that there are some kids already doing so in their free time. I came of age in a similar era for technology in general, and I took three or four electives where I was doing things with computers and it was helpful. About the only argument against it I can think of is a practical one…I don’t think school IT departments are ready for the havoc the kids could potentially unleash with this stuff, and it could be that they do not have the staff necessary to support its usage.