As a general rule with LLMs, don't just tell it to do something if you actually need to make sure it gets done. Use a hook script to make it do that, or use the history that's already there (transcripts of all sessions are retained in ~/.claude, for example). There are innumerable scripts out there to parse these, or your agent will whip one up for you in 5 minutes.

Love it! I think the power of LLMs to acquire new skills and deepen the knowdledge is underestimated.

When used correctly, they offer a huge advantage over those who don't use them and think they understand but remain superficial. I encourage you to ask even the most obvious questions.

I wish you good luck! And add that I'd be interested to hear how you get on. I intend to adopt a similar approach with my classes in September. The . history folder is a great idea.

How do you intend to assess your students?

Same issue as with cliffnotes. Easy way out means the easy way will be taken. Unless, you actually design a decent assignment or exam. In person essays or exams, heavily weighted, you are simply screwed if you didn't study the old fashioned way. A couple of my more serious classes were like this: no homework, no projects, entire grade based on 3 exams. That put the fear of whatever diety you subscribe to into you like nothing else to study hard and not fall behind. One bad exam you can't really come back from. Better luck next year when you retake it. Or, you dig in like hell.

They're only cheating themselves in a world that increasingly cares about knowledge (market trend of seniors being preferable hires to fresh out of school juniors) and not the piece of paper that "proved" you had such knowledge.

Agreed. I don't know how they plan to enforce this but this is way better than some other articles that have come up indicating educational bans on AI use, in-person proctoring, verbal assessments, pen and paper exams etc. This is the first attempt at an approach I've seen that doesn't seek to isolate education from reality; students that are effective at integrating AI into their work and actually understand what they're doing are going to get jobs, which is ultimately the goal of school.

They reference the gist of 1cg in the honor code section of CS336.

https://cs336.stanford.edu/

To be fair, shipping these guidelines as AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md in the repo that contains the assignments will make it so that agents will pick this up without needing students to opt in explicitly. Seems like a reasonable first step to me

Yes absolutely! We linked your version inside the extended AI policy document, but forgot to add it to our website cs336.stanford.edu

Congrats. This seems like a great prompt to ensure a useful default experience. People should not confuse this with "anti cheating" and instead helping people learn how to learn.

Do you have further insights on AI and education since?

We symlink AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md to a single file in our repo

They won't, because forcing the file to be named after their product is an intentional marketing choice. Free advertising on every repo that has it.

> I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.

Surely such a trivial feature could be implemented in seconds using e.g. Claude? It's not about them not "hurrying up".

I wouldn't hold my breath.

I agree. Learning to code from scratch today would be difficult to say the least. The scar tissue accrued from debugging a compilable typo, a misplaced comma or parenthesis teaches something that's hard to recreate - but replacing it with durable learning that won't age-out is a definite win.

I think the answer to "how will AI agent guidelines be enforced" is that they won't be because they can't be, at least not directly.

This doesn't mean that this approach doesn't have value though. I think it very much does.

One way to indirectly enforce use of the AI agent guidelines is via an oral examination where the instructor and student look over their work together and talk about it. Students who have genuinely tried to learn and used AI as a learning tool via the agent guidelines should do a lot better in an oral exam than students who have used AI as a solution generator.

I adopted the oral exam (without agent guidelines) for a course i teach in the academic year just gone, it worked pretty well. Next term I intend to include the agent guidelines to give them clearer guardrails. Still ultimately optional, but if students choose to ignore them it's gonna be pretty obvious during our conversation.

Stanford has an honour code. Meant no oversight even during exams. Worked surprisingly well when I was there. The flipside is, if you’re ever caught cheating, there are no second chances.

I imagine this applies here, too, if they want to enforce it strictly.

Well, no amount of instructions would work if the student has no intention to learn anything.

In an ideal world guidelines should be suggestions for those willing to make the best of the course and improve as a person and professional. However a degree has real world value and repercussions, so enabling someone incompetent to do a dangerous job can put innocent lives in jeopardy. It's tough, but I hope in time we learn how to live with this new tech.

Jailbreaking isn’t even needed - you can just modify the file

Laptop without internet access, sure. Pencil and paper? that is brutal :)

I agree it's not a complete solution. But as those don't exist as a society we are looking for a step function in the right direction. and IMO this is one such step. You may disagree that it's not a very large step, but I would argue it's still in the right direction therefore it is neccesary, especially in education space, and I'm happy to see someone publishing at attempt.

zsh is fine, but I prefer fish. It has a funnier name!

I don’t really know why this is getting downvoted. It’s clear that higher education is degrading because of easy to reach AI solutions that have no type of penalties for use.

During my undergrad it was normal to see people refer to Chegg solutions to get their answers, or as a friend for theirs.

Maybe there’s a reason my first CS professor wrote out Java code with pencil and paper I guess.

> you can actually learn a LOT by being given the answer, if you actually care to learn.

Even if you "actually care to learn", this is a huge mental shortcut and you're deceiving yourself if you think deep learning is happening from looking at the answer.

On top of that, the pressures to just finish the coursework and move on to your other homework due tomorrow seems pretty high. Your suggestion means we're no longer coddling/shielding students, but we also aren't actively helping them, are we?

My understanding is that research shows more learning happens when the student has to struggle with the material to solve problems and answer questions.

Students are struggling to get work after graduating because they're dropped into a competitive environment. Ideals aren't enough to get jobs in the current environment.

Universities should be places which are at the bleeding edge of development and providing society with the best new ideas/tech, etc has to offer. Junior workers should be hotbeds of exciting talent which have the ability to revolutionise industries.

By creating such milquetoast environments to study in, which are seemingly scared or unable to prepare people for the future, students are being done a disservice.

Far too many people are far too comfortable with their cushty positions, and it's not doing the youth any favours.

I mean, some would say that's how this whole thing got started.

> The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students.

So now students are _required_ to use agents? That's a bit crazy

Would universities be paying the token cost? Is that you Dario?

Seeing my own kids (teens) go through some of this, I'm becoming slightly less pessimistic as it all shakes out. Among their peer groups there does seem to be an opinion forming that sure, anyone can just ask ChatGPT for quick answers on assignments, but actually knowing stuff is a bit of a "flex" that's respected.

When calorie dense food and gas powered vehicles came on the scene, humans (generally) got fat and out of shape. "Why eat that salad and go for a run?" one might say, "This cheesecake tastes much better and I can just drive wherever I want to go."

Getting fat is one thing, but getting stupid is another, and I really fear for the future of humanity when it becomes so easy to sidestep the processes that let us actually learn and grow because stuff like "using agent ai coding is trivial".

using a coding tool is trivial, correct. so is using a microwave oven or its larger counter-parts. you need a certain level of person to know if what came out of it was Michelin-star or not and I do not think Stanford is going for Hot Pockets here.

You have to balance that with teaching the skills needed to understand the domain sufficiently to take over when the model gets things wrong.

As an employer, I want education to be robust from the ground up, not turn uni into an attempt to bootcamp whatever is hot today.

I don't think a 4 year postsecondary education is enough time to make a developer that can hit the ground running. Not if it's 100% of class time on CS theory. Nor if it were 4 years of vocational training and labwork that leaned heavy into AI. Nor some mix. We train on the job heavily, it's just not possible to fit everything into the sausage grinder.

So why not throw in some mandatory non-major electives? Take the time to do stuff that frustrates people who want uni to be a certificate mill. I don't care if green employees are experts at the exact narrow set of tools I use. I want them to be good at learning, and to have gotten most of the standard CS topics out of the way.

What a ridiculous take. Just because solutions exist in the llm training data, doesn't make these problems 'toy' or 'easy'. The human 'engineering hardness' scale doesn't align with what an llm can and can't do.