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.
What kind of tasks are you trying to test this out? I have not had the time but I keep wondering how do you find a task not well represented in the training set. So that it is clear what you are actually testing.
Maybe your experience says this is not really an issue and any medium or large code test will show these deficiencies.
I would have to think if you could come up with task not well represented that they would do a lot worse.
@shafik given how good the current models are at generalization, I'm not sure how to approach "not well represented in the training set".
but, what I'm doing is writing totally new LLVM passes, fixing previously unknown bugs in open source software, implementing dataflow transfer functions that are better than anything out there, etc. the current models are absolutely competent at these tasks.
@regehr @shafik Folks working in this space have also indicated that most of the major models have pretty strict recitation checking to specifically _prevent_ emitting something that is directly in their training set...
That said, I can't find good references to this. I'm worried the terminology I'm using is wrong.
And I don't expect these to be perfect. My understanding is that the goal is to have significantly less recitation than the rate at which humans tend to copy/paste from StackOverflow, which seems like a plausible bar to me.
Plaintiffs and defendants in copyright lawsuits over generative AI often make sweeping, opposing claims about the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have memorized plaintiffs' protected expression in their training data. Drawing on both machine learning and copyright law, we show that these polarized positions dramatically oversimplify the relationship between memorization and copyright. To do so, we extend a recent probabilistic extraction technique to measure memorization of 50 books in 17 open-weight LLMs. Through thousands of experiments, we show that the extent of memorization varies both by model and by book. With respect to our specific extraction methodology, we find that most LLMs do not memorize most books -- either in whole or in part. However, we also find that Llama 3.1 70B entirely memorizes some books, like the first Harry Potter book and 1984. In fact, the first Harry Potter is so memorized that, using a seed prompt consisting of just the first few tokens of the first chapter, we can deterministically generate the entire book near-verbatim. We discuss why our results have significant implications for copyright cases, though not ones that unambiguously favor either side.
Strongly depends on the uniqueness of the problem space. Pick something esoteric -- for which there are only a couple of public examples -- and you'll often get nigh-verbatim output. This is true for both coding and non-coding use cases.
@regehr There's a good C programmer I know from /r/C_programming and from his great blog who recently wrote how he completely changed towards LLM/AI coding in the past year. He always shared great insights, ideas and projects in the C sub and now the (expensive) LLM seems to work really well for him: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/29/
(Apparently not great yet in C, so it's all C++ now.)
Maybe his best-known project: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit
My post: https://redd.it/1s7mbqw
@ryan so you know how one student will have a bug, form a wrong hypothesis about it, get on the wrong track, and take a very very long time to track down the bug, whereas another student will just sort of home in on the issue right away?
I feel like it's just more of the same. it's a difference in how effective people's mental models and hypotheses are, and the available tools simply amplify whatever effects are already there.
but I have no hard evidence for anything
@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 "÷10" programmers.
@regehr My experience is: if you have a task to do something that you don’t know how to do, an LLM is a great way to complete the task without learning how to do it.
So in the short term they feel like equalizers — we all finished the assignment! — but in the…not even the long term, the immediate medium term, they amplify the gulf between skilled and unskilled. Those with a desire and ability to learn more continue to learn more; those who are struggling for any reason don’t.
René Mayrhofer 
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