Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:08:45 · S2, Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:08:45] S2: this I think it's really impactful for students to see big names, people actually doing it, like hear from them directly, be able to like ask them, of course, you know, they want to intern, they want to get jobs. It's good to have guest lecturers. [00:08:58] S0: No, I think what he's saying... So, okay, I'll sort of rephrase it. We've also interviewed Anj, who teaches the Coachella course, which is here's all the names. It's only the names. Whereas, he's actually also producing... Here's Claude Code in 200 lines of code. Right? Which is... No one's telling you to do that. No one's going come and see you to do that. But, yeah, when you want to teach fundamentals in a framework that you can use and working understanding [00:09:24] S1: That's right. [00:09:24] S0: This is the kind of thing you do.
00:09:24 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:09:24] S0: This is the kind of thing you do. [00:09:25] S1: That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and I... But I do think that there's a balance for for this kind of material, to to your point, is that there is a... You can't... It's not a 100% solidified. I mean, by design... And by design, it's a feature and maybe a bug of some some kind, but a a big portion of the curriculum did change from last year. Right? And so there's like a dynamism to the whole development of the curriculum, but I'm trying to at least put forth that there are some things that I believe are kind of sticking around, and yes, prompting coding agents, they've gotten smarter. What does that mean in terms of the new ways of dealing with them? But then still, Boris is also gonna know something that I don't know. Right? So let's let's have let's have him also come [00:09:59] S0: to the [00:09:59] S1: table and and share his learnings. [00:10:01] S2: One of the fun things I noticed this time around is a good bit of the portion is on open source contributions. What's the thinking behind that? You have people...
00:10:01 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:10:01] S2: One of the fun things I noticed this time around is a good bit of the portion is on open source contributions. What's the thinking behind that? You have people... [00:10:12] S1: Yeah, yeah. This is one of the things that I'm honestly kind of most proud of and and most excited about. I mean, is about to be week two of the class. Yeah. So this is this is the very gracious open source partners that I I spent the greater part of this summer just kind of talking to and and getting them kind of excited about and and and interested in in sort of this offering. Basically, the idea was... So last year when I taught the class, we had like nine assignments and then we had like a capstone open ended project. Right? The nine assignments were basically me sort of like coming up with these pedagogical exercises like, oh, here's a repo. Like, use an AI code review tool to to, you know, post a code review and then see what... Why is it good, why is it not good. So relatively pedagogical. Honestly, pretty easy. I think for a lot of folks, they could've just, like, one shot it. And I thought, okay, this is not that helpful. At this point, agents are around. I mean, they they have every student that I surveyed, you know, on Tuesday, not a single person really types by by hand anymore. They're like, everyone's using coding agents. There's no... There's... And this is, you know, like, all sophomores, juniors at at Stanford. [00:11:10] S0: Do you do you survey them? What's the market share? [00:11:12] S1: What tools What they Okay. I haven't yet, but that's
00:11:12 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[00:11:12] S1: What tools What they Okay. I haven't yet, but that's [00:11:16] S0: You good should do it. Yeah. [00:11:17] S1: Yeah. I will You can [00:11:19] S2: do it spicy. Stanford prefers. [00:11:21] S1: No. Well, think through the university, I think they have some... Most of the providers have educational program, right? Yeah, [00:11:28] S2: they're very generous on plans for students. [00:11:32] S0: Right, right.
00:11:32 · Mihail Eric
[00:11:32] S1: So I think by default, even before the class, there's a Claude license, imagine Cursor license, there's probably a Cognition license as well. I don't know. You might know that better than I do. But what I was able to also just accrue on top of that was, hey, like, if I don't want people to be bottlenecked by, like, the $20 a month subscription, like, I want you guys to go... If you want, like, token max something just to see what's possible, then then you should. And so... And I'll come back to the the partners. But the the additional thing I was able to to crew through instead of talking to folks was, like, additional credits for students. So, like, Factory is also getting involved. The the Cognition folks are getting involved. OpenAI as well. But, anyway, so so so for the the open source partners, I I sort of, like, was, okay. One of the things I'm most concerned about when it comes to educate the next kind of generation of of students is that if everyone is saying, kind of, to Swyx's point, like, they're cooked. Like, you know, what... What's gonna happen to them? There there... There's almost like this sense of them being left behind. And I think that mentorship is a really important piece of just up leveling everyone and making sure that there isn't this massive gap that folds that occurs between the senior people that have already been in the industry before coding agents and know what's up, and they adopt coding agents and they become amazing. And then the juniors that are just like, okay, now what do we do? So in a sense, one of the the kind of goals was, hey, coding agents are really good. I wanna put you guys in situations where you're dealing with complex code bases, large code bases at scale. We're gonna work with some of, like, what I think are among the best, like, AI native repos, you know, that all do AI focused things or either coding agents themselves or building tools in the service of agents, you know, in the modern world. I want you guys to get involved with these projects. I want part of your assignments to be actually contributing to these projects. In the course of being in all of those projects, you will actually be talking to the maintainers. They will be reviewing your code. They will be helping you build mental models of, like, good software.
00:13:13 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
In that way, there's effectively this, like, passing on of, like, the guard of true good software design in a way that, you know, I don't think most students get the opportunity to do. And then there's the benefit, of course, that, like, I'm sure some of them will get, you know, poached and picked up as part of doing well in those assignments. [00:13:28] S0: Yeah. One of the interesting things, you know, for what it's worth, I'm I'm gonna get a bunch of hate if I don't say this. I think you say cooked and versus cracked for dramatic effect. But, you know, like, it's just nice to to state extremes. Sure. Sure. Yeah. And so so maybe we should go into the sort of detail of the curriculum, or is there anything else you wanna explore at the top level? [00:13:48] S1: I mean like that, that's a very helpful. Yeah. All that's there. [00:13:52] S2: I have high level questions about students using tools, best practices. Are you pro it like individual tutors? I'm assuming this will also be picked up by students. So, before we dive straight into the course, just anything you have guidance on there for? [00:14:11] S1: Like in terms of what... [00:14:11] S2: Yeah, you said you're passionate about education, right? Like there's also a stigma of one side is how do teachers, professors use it? And then how can students best use these tools? That's not just throw your assignments in, it can kind of one shot it. How do you still learn? Like if you have anything there?