Students should absolutely not use cloud LLMs.
Maybe there should be a class on how how to use LLMs too.
But learning computer science using LLMs all the time will be like learning to ride a bike using training wheels, and never taking them off.
Maybe there should be a class on how how to use LLMs too.
But learning computer science using LLMs all the time will be like learning to ride a bike using training wheels, and never taking them off.
Or like learning to add fractions by looking up the answer key instead of actually struggling to figure it out.
I expect people that read things here to be literate. i choose optimism.
Similarly, in a computer science curriculum, you could use LLMs to visualize various cache invalidation strategies, sorting algorithms, etc. As I've said here before, when I was at university, I would have Tuesday and Thursday classes that were 80 minutes long. I attended a research university, so the professors were not big on teaching what things were for. They would just sort of dive in and start talking while they were writing on the board. This led to a situation where we'd get 10 or 15 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, and I would have lost the thread, missed some step in how they'd proceeded with the proof, etc. Having an LLM there to ask for the missing piece so that I could keep up with the lecture would have been invaluable to my education.
All the LLM hate feels a lot like "screen time", where, for some reason, it took decades for people to realize it was what you were doing on the screen that mattered, not the fact that you were looking at a screen. Similarly, it's what we do with the LLMs that matters, not the fact that we're using one.