"LLM did something bad, then I asked it to clarify/explain itself" is not critical analysis but just an illustration of magic thinking.

Those systems generate tokens. That is all. They don't "know" or "understand" or can "explain" anything. There is no cognitive system at work that could respond meaningfully.

That's the same dumb shit as what was found in Apple Intelligence's system prompt: "Do not hallucinate" does nothing. All the tokens you give it as input just change the part of the word space that was stored in the network. "Explain your work" just leads the network to lean towards training data that has those kinds of phrases in it (like tests and solutions). It points the system at a different part but the system does not understand the command. It can't.

What are the "essential" skills that computer science students need? I think they need to understand coding, algorithms, and other parts of CS well enough to ask the right questions (of an LLM, search engine, or other human), and understand and validate the answers. Perhaps a useful frame of mind is: "Eventually you will be supervising people or machines. You need basic technical understanding, critical thinking, and project management skills."

#education #pedagogy #CSEd #ComputerScience