> My take: learning to use AI is not hard. They can do that on their own. Learning programming is hard, and relying on AI will only make it harder

Depends on what your definition of "hard" is - I routinely come across engineers who are frustrated that "AI" hallucinates. Humans can detect hallucinations and I have specific process to detect and address them. I wouldn't call those processes easy - I would say it's as hard as learning how to do integration by summing.

> but you can't use AI in coding effectively if you don't know how to code

Depends on the LLM. I have a fine-tuned version of Qwen3-Coder where if you ask it to show you to compare to strings in C/C++, it will but then it will also suggest you look at a version that takes unicode into account.

I have stumbled across very few software engineers who even know what unicode codepoints are and why legacy ASCII string comparison fails.

> but won't know how to write for loop on their own. Which means they'll be helpless to interpret AI's output or to jump in when the AI produces suboptimal results

That's a very large logical jump. If we went back 20 years, you might come across professors and practising engineers who were losing sleep that languages like C/C++ were abstracting the hardware so much that you could just write for loops and be helpless to understand how those for loops were causing needless CPU wait cycles by blocking the cache line.

> Depends on what your definition of "hard" is - I routinely come across engineers who are frustrated that "AI" hallucinates. Humans can detect hallucinations and I have specific process to detect and address them. I wouldn't call those processes easy - I would say it's as hard as learning how to do integration by summing.

My students don't seem to have a problem using AI: it's quite adequate to the task of completing their homework for them. I therefore don't feel a need to complete my buzzword bingo by promoting an "AI-first classroom." The concern is what they'll do when they find problems more challenging than their homework.

> I have stumbled across very few software engineers who even know what unicode codepoints are and why legacy ASCII string comparison fails.

You are proving my point. If the programmer doesn't know what Unicode is, then the AI's helpful suggestion is likely to be ignored. You need to know enough to be able to make sense of the AI beyond a superficial measure.

> That's a very large logical jump. If we went back 20 years, you might come across professors and practising engineers who were losing sleep that languages like C/C++ were abstracting the hardware so much that you could just write for loops and be helpless to understand how those for loops were causing needless CPU wait cycles by blocking the cache line.

We still teach that stuff. Being an engineer requires understand the whole machine. I'm not talking about mid-level marketroids who are excited that Claude can turn their Excel sheets into PowerPoints. I'm talking about actual engineers who take responsibility for their code. For every helpful suggestion that AI makes, it botches something else. When the AI gives up, where do you turn?