David Malan

What I don't want the computer to take from me is sort of the fun part that's always been there, which is the designing of the system itself.

Maybe thinking about what the UX should be so that you can optimize for the user experience or whatever.

What the database design might be or what data you want to collect in pursuit of some business problem because you know you're going to need to analyze or mine it for some valuable insight later on.

Like that stuff's probably not going away anytime soon.

And the other reassurance I would give students nowadays is like the world is only getting more technological.

And we've kind of seen this pattern before where I took CS50, for instance, at really the peak of the so-called dot com era.

So 1996 and then sort of the world started trending down when all the startups were going out of business and students were exiting computer science.

But like,

then the pendulum swung back and i don't think we have saturated the world in terms of technology every business small and large is probably going to keep using it more and more we in our personal lives are only going to keep needing it more and more and so like those are problems to be solved and yes i don't think we'll need as many humans to write html and css anymore which was

At the risk of picking another fight, never that much fun anyway.

And maybe we won't really need to use C or Python anymore, but we can start programming like a PM, a product manager, using our voice, using our words in English or some other human language.

But that alone would be wonderful.

Case in point, I was playing with Claude this morning to just help me prototype something, and it was wonderful for me to be able to just think about the problem and sort of the engineering side of it and say, all right, Claude, much like an intern, please go implement this for me because I really don't want to go reading the documentation, which was never that intellectually interesting.

I could if I wanted to, and I understand how it's structured, but I don't need to keep repeating that kind of exercise again and again.

But at least in the near term, case in point, Claude came back very confidently with a solution that was like 90% correct.

And I had to convince Claude, so to speak, by chatting back with it that like, no, no, no, no, like this is not possible per the API docs at this URL.

So of course you get the apologetic response from the LLM and this kind of error rate or hallucination will decrease with frequency.

But like, this is why the human should stay in charge for some time.

But insofar as our goal within even a class like CS50 has always been to output a more educated citizenry, to teach students how to teach themselves, to

teach them how to be more methodical, more algorithmic and problem solving.