My College Kid’s Professor Requires AI For Programming: What I Learned As A Parent
Last Sunday, my 20-year-old Sam, a second-year computer science major, pushed a half-eaten serving of chicken fried rice around his plate and glowered at his open laptop across the dinner table. I’d just asked how his new semester classes were going, and he’d been putting off answering. “My intro to software engineering prof is requiring us to use AI for every programming assignment,” he said, finally. “I came here to learn how to write code. What’s the point if AI does it for me?”
I got that familiar twist in my chest, the same one I got two years ago when his high school teacher sent home a note banning ChatGPT for essays. For my whole adult life, I’d absorbed the narrative that AI in school equals cutting corners, equals cheating, equals kids growing up not knowing how to do basic work on their own. I was ready to fire off an email to the department head that night, until Sam reminded me he’d already talked to his advisor, and still felt weird about it. I agreed to hold off, and texted his old high school programming teacher, Ms. Lopez, who I still knew from chaperoning coding club field trips, to ask if she had 20 minutes for coffee the next day.
She met me at the corner shop downtown, ordered an oat milk latte, and pulled up her own adjunct syllabus for the intro coding class she teaches at the local community college. Turns out she requires AI too. She pulled up a sample assignment to show me: students have to build a basic personal budget app. AI generates the base structure, but students have to add a custom notification feature that warns you when you’re over budget in a category, comment every single line of the AI-generated code to explain what it does in their own words, and find and fix three common errors that AI almost always includes in the base code. “It’s not that I don’t want them to learn syntax,” she said, stirring her coffee. “If I make them write every line from scratch, they spend 80% of their time debugging typos and forgetting semicolons. That’s boring, and that’s not what programmers actually do anymore. Now I get 80% of their time spent on problem-solving, which is the part that actually matters.”
I went home that afternoon and asked Sam to show me his current assignment. Sure enough, it was almost exactly what Ms. Lopez described. His prof had them use AI to build the base of a to-do list app, but they had to add a feature that sorts tasks by due date, fix two broken buttons, and write a short paragraph explaining how the local storage code that AI wrote works. Sam pulled up the raw AI output to show me: the delete button would only remove the last task you added, not the one you clicked, and the app duplicated all your tasks every time you refreshed the page. He’d spent three hours digging through the code to find the mistakes. “That’s more time than I would’ve spent writing the whole base myself,” he admitted, leaning back in his chair. “I just didn’t expect to have to work this hard when I heard we could use AI.”
That’s when it clicked for me. Most of us parents grew up in a world where school rewarded memorization and writing every step from scratch. We carried that over to our kids’ education, so any tool that does the basic steps for you feels like cheating. But there are concrete things you can do when your kid comes to you confused like mine was, instead of panicking. First, just say, “Walk me through what the assignment actually asks you to do with AI.” Don’t stop at your kid’s first confused take that “they’re making me use AI so I don’t have to learn anything.” Most of the time, when you see the requirements, you’ll find it’s not about letting AI do all the work.
Second, if your kid is still worried they’re not building real skills for jobs, ask them to count how much time they spend problem-solving vs. copying basic syntax. Sam texted his old internship boss, who writes code full time, after our conversation, and asked what he thought. His boss said he uses AI tools every single day at work, and the new grads who struggle the most aren’t the ones who can’t write a for loop from memory – they’re the ones who can’t spot when AI’s code is wrong, or tweak it to do what the project actually needs. If you or your kid still have questions after that, suggest they go to the professor’s office hours to talk through it. Most profs implementing this are well aware it’s a big shift from what students are used to, and they’re happy to explain their reasoning. Sam went, and came back saying he felt a lot better – the prof told him the final exam has a section where students have to write basic code from scratch anyway, to make sure everyone knows the fundamentals.
Last week, Sam sent me a screenshot of his grade on that first to-do app assignment: A-, he lost half a point because his explanation of local storage was too vague. I still have lingering questions, honestly. I worry about students who don’t have the support to push past that initial confusion, who just copy the AI code and turn it in without doing the explanation or debugging part. I don’t know if this method will produce better programmers in the long run, or if it’s just a temporary messy shift as education catches up to technology. But what I do know is that this isn’t the AI-cheating scandal it sounded like at first dinner table glance. For us, the biggest change has been letting go of the old rules we learned about school, and trusting that what looks like cutting corners is actually just teaching kids the skills they’ll actually need when they get a job. Right now, that’s enough for us. We’ll see how it looks when he walks across that graduation stage in two years.
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