AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reaction to the AI agent guidelines

  • Many see the guidelines as a reasonable, realistic middle ground between banning AI and letting it write all the code.
  • Others consider them “good intention but useless” because they rely on student self-restraint and are easy to bypass.
  • Some think elite institutions should go much further in rethinking curricula around AI, not just adding a README.

Enforceability and honor-code debates

  • Repeated concern: guidelines are fundamentally unenforceable; students can just use external models or edit CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md.
  • Defenders argue enforcement is secondary; the value is in clearly stating “healthy use” norms and trusting students’ integrity.
  • There’s disagreement about how well honor codes work in practice; some claim they worked surprisingly well, others say cheating is common and largely invisible.

Learning vs. shortcutting

  • Many worry that easy access to AI encourages “cognitive laziness,” analogous to junk food vs. exercise.
  • Others argue students should be allowed full use of AI, with responsibility on instructors to design assessments that still test real understanding.
  • Several note that students can deceive themselves into thinking they’re learning when they’re passively watching AI or videos.
  • Some report direct experience: using AI heavily for code feels like “cheating myself” and harms skill-building.

Assessment design in an AI world

  • Strong support for high-stakes in-person exams (written, oral, or laptop-without-internet) to ensure students can perform without agents.
  • Suggestions include:
    • Harder, more conceptual assignments where agents struggle or can’t be blindly trusted.
    • Oral exams / code walkthroughs that quickly expose AI-generated work without understanding.
    • Weighting exams heavily and treating homework more as practice, even if some cheat there.

Use of AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md and tooling

  • Discussion of using AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md as a standard contract for how agents should behave in a repo.
  • Some think the Stanford version is too verbose and may fall out of context; others say long prompts are common and effective.
  • A few instructors are experimenting with similar files plus AI-usage histories to coach, not punish, overreliance.

Student culture and future skills

  • Reports that many teens both use AI and culturally “hate” it; knowing material without AI is seen as a social “flex.”
  • Employers in the thread split between:
    • Wanting students trained to use AI fully on hard problems.
    • Wanting deep fundamentals and general learning ability, not tool-specific optimization.