CS student says university's chaotic AI adoption is ruining her degree
A scholarship student describes her university flip-flopping on AI policy, creating inconsistent rules and overwhelming workloads.
What to know
- A CS scholarship student says her university's AI adoption has become chaotic and counterproductive, cycling through conflicting policies that confuse students on whether to use AI or avoid it entirely.
- The university is using AI to cut costs by auto-generating course content, assessments, and feedback with minimal human review, resulting in errors and unrealistic workloads that triple the expected effort.
- The student argues the strategy prioritizes institutional cost-cutting and 'scale' over actual learning outcomes, leaving both students overwhelmed and tutors underresourced and burned out.
- The essay has spread across Hacker News, Lobsters, and Mastodon, reaching tech communities with 59+ comments on the primary post.
speckx (author) CS scholarship studentAnonymous university Institution implementing AI integration
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Essay gains traction on tech-focused forums and social media
The post spread across Hacker News (82 points, 59 comments), Lobsters (4 points), and Mastodon, reaching multiple tech communities within hours of publication.
“During my studies, my uni has flip flopped between YOU MUST NEVER USE AI and YOU MUST USE AI and also YES WE'RE USING AI BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD!”
— Student (speckx), CS scholarship student · source -
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https:// lordtoots.bearblog.dev/ai-is-d estroying-my-cs-degree/ This post matches my experience in Computer Science classes. LLMs are being used to generate low quality lessons, assignments, and presentations. We're being forced to use LLMs and other times forbidden. That combined with the highly competitive environment of many CS classes makes it…
2 more of the top 3 · 22 posts in this stretch
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I've been a software engineer for about 5 years and became a senior engineer.I'm very lucky that I was already an engineer when AI arrived.I've always pursued simplicity and clarity in code, spending a lot of time and effort on code refactoring.Pursuing code quality and efficiency, developing code that is easy to extend, highly available, and…
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AI is destroying my CS degree L: https:// lordtoots.bearblog.dev/ai-is-d estroying-my-cs-degree/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0353300 posted on 2026.11.03 at 10:35:06 (c=2, p=13)
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background
CS student publishes essay on university's damaging AI adoption strategy — A computer science scholarship student published a detailed account of how her university's chaotic and contradictory AI integration has degraded her educational experience. She describes constant policy reversals—from prohibiting AI use to mandating it to penalizing it—and poor-quality AI-generated course content and assessment briefs.
What people are saying 18 voices from 1 site · best of 22 · verbatim
- Nov 4
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I've always wanted to go back to university if I ever became wealthy enough. I thought I'd be able to enjoy learning purely for its own sake. Now I'm not sure universities will still be in good shape by then.Recently, I gave a talk to 4th grade university students in Korea, titled "The Role of Developers in the Age of Agents." Someone asked me how…
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Conversely, AI is doing the opposite of destroying my informal computer study. I've gone from a windows 10 user who "always wanted to learn computers", to someone who knows a little bit of HTML, CSS, JS, some rust, and linux's bash now. AI has been a great tutor for that. It seems I love learning about computers, but that the docs that teach how…
- Nov 3
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CS teachers using AI for coursework design sounds insane to me. I graduated right around when GPT3.5 was released and I felt and still feel like surely the coursework itself shouldn't have changed that much? Most cs courses I took were basically1. Homework: Which was async and could be cheated on anyway 2. Projects: Which were also async and could…
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What it's done for learning velocity is incredible. But it's limiting our abilities to change jobs, at least 95% of us, and that sucks.If you're highly in demand or sitting on millions of equity, more power to you, you can work on projects outside at home by the pool thanks to AI.
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Many people in the tech world seem to espouse a great love for "always learning", but the way in which it is said always feels funny to me. Learn about what? When people say this, do they mean that they want to always be learning the next programming language, the next web framework, the next thick-client frontend web framework, the next python…
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Lots of people saying they were able to learn XYZ from AI and therefore they’re not worried about job losses etc.However, the second part of that statement is almost implicitly contradicted by the first.If AI can teach you something well enough, it can likely implement it on its own well enough as well.And unlike learning and teaching in the past…
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> Coursework design has gone down the toilet. I mean, it was never perfect to begin with.At my uni they had us doing assignments in assembly on day one, before anything was actually taught. The lab handbook said "your first year programing courses will serve you well." lol. Apparently it used to be a 2nd year course and they just moved it to the…
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I don't envy educators right now.AI clearly means you need to change how you teach and evaluate students. We are only a few years in though, and it's still extremely unclear what effective teaching with these tools looks like.The worst part is that the evaluation loop is measured in multiple years! If you start trying some new education mechanism…
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> AI is not replacing you or an education. AI is raising the bar of what you can comprehend and retain. From someone who is technically minded (and self-taught), all I have ever wanted is to keep learning.AI is, in my opinion, absolutely murdering the junior dev market. It's now much more efficient to pay for a senior or staff engineer and set…
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I wonder how you'd do without your AI augmentation if you find yourself not being able to use it for whatever reason. I wonder what you retained when the AI is not working... or with a very expensive augmentation that wants more cut from your pay...
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> A CS degree was never going to provide you with all of the tools that you need for a successful career. It provided you with the basics to get your foot in the door.Yes and no.I concur that it was never about the tools, although I've seen plenty of people advocating it had a more "practical" approach, using the same tools as companies use, and…
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I’m hearing this more and more from both students and teachers. It seems like everyone in education is frustrated and can’t figure out how to use AI for education productively yet.TBH I’m also thinking about how to use AI at work for learning. (My work environment is 100% all-in on AI.) Everyone can see and admit that AI coding is making us lazier…
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Hey.First off, congrats on spending time doing side projects in OpenProcessing. Keep working on projects that keep you motivated and keep you learning.We've been there, lost in our learning paths. Even before AI there were times when we were overwhelmed with our CS journey. You'll overcome, don't you worry about that.The CS degree was never the…
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While AI is writing much much more of my code these days, I still need to be able to speak intelligently about what I am building, why I chose a given design and the tradeoffs between alternatives. When fixing things, it's still important to understand what broke and why. I don't think that will ever change in any organization that operates in…
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Answers so far are assuming that this is complaining that their traditional CS course is not that useful for getting a job anymore.That’s not what it’s about. It’s actually from someone who genuinely wants to learn for the sake of learning who’s talking about how AI is creating havoc in her studies.
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I used to have a lot of anxiety about Ai wiping out all the Software specific jobs, software development/testing/project management, etc. I actually do think that's still likely to be the case going forward. Pick an industry and try and become an expert in it. Someone will still have to prompt and dream up new features. There are still things that…
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Being able to write a coherent critique that stays practical and doesn't stray into bombastic moralisation or interpersonal frustration is a rare skill that speaks well to your communication skill and taste. I think you will do just fine in a world of AI in engineering.
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> It's been a huge learning curve.I have been doing this professionally for over twenty years, and I still learn something every day. Over the past couple years, with AI augmentation, I learn even more, move faster and go deeper into the systems that I work on.A CS degree was never going to provide you with all of the tools that you need for a…