Mihail Eric
On Latent Space
“I really believe that every company needs you, but the floor is much higher. You're entering as your first job out of school, and it's not sufficient to just be an L3 at Google, if you're going to use that kind of leveling system. You have to generally be better than almost at the senior level going into this.”
Latent Space · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
Asked whether students should still study computer science now that coding agents exist, Eric says a well-trained AI engineer is valuable, but the bar for a new graduate has risen sharply. It is the premise of his Stanford course.
Transcript
…code bases. I help a lot of companies also with thinking through their massive code base designs and things like that. And so really it's more of a practitioner's course for once the students have graduated or now entering the workforce, how to be the most productive members of the workforce.
You said you're passionate about education. I feel like students in that phase of being in college are in a pretty interesting spot. Any advice and any take? Should people study computer science right now? Is cloud code and codecs all we need? I want to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, there's a lot of anxiety from students, as you can probably imagine. And I think a lot of what I'm trying to communicate this time around is that the anxiety, a lot of it still is here, and there was anxiety last year as well. But I want to make the case that a well-trained AI Engineer, and I know that's like a buzzy word, but let's say we'll dive into maybe what aspects of that are most interesting. Like well-trained AI Engineer engineer can be some of the most useful asset to any company around. And so, this is the first week of class, actually, and week one, first lecture, hey, I really believe that every company needs you, but the floor is much higher, right? So you're entering as your first job out of school, but it's not sufficient to just be an L3 and a Google term if you're going to use that kind of leveling system there. It's like you have to generally be better than almost at the senior level going to this. So how do we get there more quickly? And so I'm trying to say that there is still a core bit of foundational software engineering that is important to have, some of these…
Yeah, this is something I've said before, which is almost like the controversial, it's like the kind of thing you say to be spicy, but I do genuinely kind of believe it, which is most students are cooked. Some of them are going to be super valuable. I don't think it's a very popular thing.…
situation because I feel like a lot of education is slow to move. I'm even curious how do you determine where do you put the end date to curriculum in a course on the internet? Oh my God. You're teaching a Stanford modern software. That's changing everything. You
cheat. You just get the people from the coding agents to come and speak, right?
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