Half of intro programming students fail after leaning on AI, professor says they don't know they don't understand
lemire · x · 2026-09-06
Computer scientist Daniel Lemire shares a cautionary observation: asking questions and seeking deeper understanding is the real superpower, and the biggest problem is what you believe you understand but don't.
- Over the past six months, roughly 50% of students in his school's introductory programming course failed — they used AI to do their preparation but couldn't answer simple questions when a human asked.
- Some even formally appealed, insisting they understood the material. Lemire stresses they aren't lying: they genuinely think they know.
- The core point: AI makes completion easy, but it cannot build understanding for you — being able to explain what you've heard, seen, and read is what counts as real learning.
More from AGI Musings
- Senior researcher rebuts 'one-person pretraining' fear: your fundamentals matter more, not less — RexDouglass · 2026-10-23
- NBER releases 'The Economics of Transformative AI' edited by Agrawal and Brynjolfsson — JMateosGarcia · 2026-10-23
- Pedro Domingos: AI Is an Intelligence Lever — the Smarter You Are, the Smarter It Makes You — pmddomingos · 2026-10-23
- Anil Seth: Consciousness Is a Property of Life, Not Computation — Building Conscious AI Is a Bad Idea — anilkseth · 2026-10-23
- Pedro Domingos predicts 2027 will see the most security vulnerabilities fixed in history — pmddomingos · 2026-10-23
- AI+Lean theorem proving loses to Bitter Lesson: OpenAI math gains come from non-formalized reasoning — Singularitarian · 2026-10-23