this spring I've been teaching undergrads to use LLM agents. my rationale for doing this was that it would give me a chance to covertly teach lots of real software engineering, which is what I've done.
meanwhile, I've been watching the students closely to try to figure out whether a coding agent is a leveling factor (reducing differences in effectiveness between different students) or an anti-leveling factor (amplifying differences). at this point I'm 99% sure it's the second thing.
@regehr Eons ago, in my 4th year operating systems course, the assignment was to build a linking loader for a simplified version of OS/360 object files. I wrote a test case, which ended up being used by almost everyone. And, for the hell of it, I implemented the not-so-simple cases (e.g. 3-byte unaligned address). AFAIK, everyone who passed my easy test case also passed the hard test case (~5 out of the class of ~40). We marked each other's code ... I was given the code of someone who had a good reputation and I can only describe their code as "not even wrong".
I don't think I'm a "10x" programmer but there are definitely "รท10" programmers.
John Regehr
Peter Ludemann