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ME Mihail Eric Mihail Eric On Latent Space

“For a lot of folks, they could have just one-shot it. And I thought, okay, this is not that helpful. At this point, agents are around. Every student that I surveyed on Tuesday, not a single person really types by hand anymore. Everyone's using coding agents. And this is all sophomores, juniors at Stanford.”

Latent Space · AI Builders · November 2026

“For a lot of folks, they could have just one-shot it. And I thought, okay, this is not that helpful. At this point, agents are around. Every student that I surveyed on Tuesday, not a single person really types by hand anymore. Everyone's using coding agents. And this is all sophomores, juniors at Stanford.” — Mihail Eric, Latent Space

Context

Eric explains why he replaced last year's nine teaching assignments with contributions to real open-source projects, where maintainers review the students' code. The old exercises could be solved with a single agent prompt.

Transcript

Latent Space Around 07:30 into the episode
Mihail Eric

Yeah.

Alessio Fanelli

What's the thinking behind that? You have people.

Mihail Eric

Yeah, yeah. This is one of the things that I'm honestly kind of most proud of and most excited about. I mean, this is about to be week two of the class. Yeah, so this is the very gracious open source partners that I spent the greater part of this summer just kind of talking to and getting them kind of excited about and interested 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 post a code review and then see why is it good, why is it not good. So relatively pedagogical, honestly, pretty easy. I think for a lot of folks, they could have just one-shot it. And I thought, okay, this is not that helpful. At this point, agents are around. I mean, they have every student that I surveyed on Tuesday, not a single person really types by hand anymore. They're like, everyone's using coding agents. And this is all…

Speaker 1

Do you survey them as the market share?

Mihail Eric

Was that like what tools they use? Okay, I haven't yet, but that's a good cause. Yeah, yeah. I will be able to do that. You could be spicy.

Alessio Fanelli

Stanford Teaches. No, no.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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