Student Perceptions of AI Coding Assistants in Learning
26 comments
·November 29, 2025borski
Crazy idea but: what if we built an AI pair programmer that actually pair programmed? That is, sometimes it was the driver and you navigated, pretty much as it is today, but sometimes you drive and it navigates.
I surmise that would help people learn to code better.
taurath
I am not a student and I wonder often whether we fill in memorization for the idea of learning, as though it’s somehow more valuable to be able to write valid syntax from memory on a blank file than it is to know and practice the broader strokes of abstractions, operators, readability and core concepts which make up good software craftsmanship.
Sometimes I’m doing something in a new to me language, using an LLM to give me a head start on structure and to ask questions about conventions and syntax, and wondering to myself how much I’m missing had I started just by reading the first half of a book on the language. I think I probably would take a lot longer to do anything useful, but I’d probably also have a deeper understanding of what I know and don’t know. But then, I can just as easily discover those fundamental concepts to a language via the right prompt. So am I learning? Am I somehow fooling myself? How?
thomasahle
I'm not sure we really know how much of learning is memorization. As we memorize more stuff, we find patterns to compress it and memorize more efficiently.
jjmarr
Because not everyone can truly be great at their craft, but everyone can memorize syntax.
Schools compromise their curriculum so that every student has a chance in the interests of fairness.
tehjoker
You have to know the basics to build higher level knowledge and skills. What’s the use of high level book learning without the ability to operationalize it
dcre
Interesting to see quotes but note N=20 and the methodology doesn’t seem all that rigorous. I didn’t see anything that wasn’t exactly what you would expect to hear.
bgwalter
It is notable that so many publications try to salvage "AI" ("need for new pedagogical approaches that integrate AI effectively") rather than ditch "AI" completely.
The world worked perfectly before 2023, there is no need to outsource information retrieval or thinking.
Wowfunhappy
The world worked perfectly before 1982, there is no need for the internet.
(…I actually kind of think this.)
srpinto
Ah yes, the perfect world we had when governments could get away with anything because the press was not enough to showcase their attrocities. A beautiful, perfect world, with rubella and a global population living in extreme poverty close to 50% (compared to today's 10%).
I see this mentality almost exclusively in americans and/or anglo people in general, it's incredible... if you're not that, I guess you're just too young or completely isolated from reality and I wish you the best in the ongoing western collapse.
(... I actually wish you're joking and I didn't catch it, though).
daseiner1
last sentence in your first paragraph has nothing to do with the current state of the internet and certainly not AI. first sentence? turns out governments can still get away with pretty much anything and propaganda is easier than ever.
awesome_dude
God no.
Speaking as someone that communicates primarily through text (high likelihood of Autism) the internet was the first chance a lot of us had to ... speak.. and be heard
deadbabe
That’s not a problem that generalizes to the broader population. We don’t really need internet.
ako
Where is this perfect world you’re speaking of? Surely not the one we’re living in…
null
rezz
Why stop there? We could do long division before the calculator and hand write before the typewriter.
maplethorpe
I do wonder if the calculator would have been as successful if it regularly delivered wrong answers.
analog31
My typerwriter delivered wrong answers.
Bootvis
It does if you’re a clumsy operator and those are not rare.
walt_grata
Did you learn how to do long division in schools? I did, and I wasn't allowed to use calculators on a test until I was in highschool and basic math wasn't what was being taught or evaluated.
moregrist
I also learned long division in school.
I was allowed to use a calculator from middle school onward, when we were being tested on algebra and beyond and not arithmetic.
Some schools have ridiculous policies. Some don’t. Ymmv. I don’t think that’s changed from when I was in school.
> Automatic creation of an initial billboard: Upon starting the program, a predefined list of movies currently showing must be automatically generated, including their details (title, genre, duration, and showtimes).
I would say that these results might be relevant for a university CS program setting, but I would make the distinction between this and actually learning to program.
The context of this task is definitely a very contrived "Let's learn OOP" assignment that, for example, just tires to cram in class inheritance without really justifying it's use in the software that's being built. It's a lazy kind of curriculum building that doesn't actually tell the students about OOP.
In that sense it's no wonder that AI is not that helpful in the context of the assignment and learning.
I wouldn't chalk this up to "AI doesn't help you learn". I would put this in the category of, in an overly academic assignment with contrived goals, AI doesn't help the student accomplish the goals of the course. That conclusion could be equally applied to French literature 102.
And that's very different from whether or not an AI coding assistant can help you learn to code or not. (I'm actually not sure if it can, but I think this study doesn't say anything new).