AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

This is interesting. I don't know how the AI agent guidelines will be enforced because there will always be a model outside the curriculum that a student can use to bypass the guidelines. Encouraging academic integrity is useful but requires the student to buy into the idea that they are paying for an education, not a diploma. This is a tough problem and I have been wondering how CS departments are incorporating AI into the curriculum while encouraging appropriate use in a learning environment.

This would be an interesting approach if the course supplied a custom Harness (perhaps in place of a textbook) and this was part of the instruction set inside of it. As a standalone thing you ask students to import into their agent, seems unlikely to work.

Hah, I like that these are presented as a CLAUDE.md.

(They have the same content duplicated in an AGENTS.md as well - I really wish Anthropic would hurry up and teach Claude Code to check for that file too.)

I think these are based on the one I posted a while back:

https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac

yeah I don't think that's going to work - it would be kind of like "we're releasing model answers to all assignments but please only use them as a teaching aid and don't copy from them"

best to

a) adapt assignments so that agents are bad at producing solutions

b) have more scenarios where students have to do things in controlled environments. Universities managed to adapt to 'any solution you need is readily available online' so I don't think it will be that different to have several times a month/year where students have to go into a room with nothing but pencil and paper to prove what knowledge they have vs what they have the skills to access

This seems somewhat sensible to me - the genie _is_ out of the bottle, and students absolutely will use AI agents to finish assignments without learning a thing, but there is some value to showing how agents can be used as teaching tools and what healthy use _can_ look like

> What AI Agents SHOULD NOT Do

> * Run bash commands

Students who prefer to use zsh keep winning.

And, yes students are going to follow it....

good intention but useless let's be real

This is ridiculous. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle. This is the equivalent of "you wouldn't download a car". (Yes, we would.)

The solution is to scale the difficulty of the objective measures. Expect far more from students.

Reorient the university around physical laboratories and timesharing resources no single student could afford. It's already like this in many STEM disciplines.

More internships, more networking, more large projects. Less trivial tests of knowledge and credentialism.

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I always wonder why there is such course. Using agent ai coding tool is trivial.