Teaching Computer Science in this New World

And by “New World” I mean the inflection point that happened at the end of 2025 with Claude Code and Opus. I haven’t been this excited and concerned since the dawn of the web in the early 1990s.

The Big Question as a CS instructor is this: how do I best prepare our students for the future workforce?

Actually the question is broader now as I’m leading an internal AI committee at WOU for our three main programs (computer science, information systems, and data analytics: how do webest prepare out students?

Here’s a dump of big impacts and open questions for our program:

• Ignoring AI (and specifically agentic programming) would be a huge mistake. So when do we introduce it? None of us agree that it should be in our intro classes (commonly referred to as “CS 1” though for us it is CS 161/162) but… when? For now we are settling on the junior sequence where we go deeper into web development and test driven development. I do think there’s a place for AI in the early classes though: mainly as a tutor and supplement to traditional instruction.
• How do you keep curriculum current? CS has a special burden of upkeep on curriculum, especially for a vocationally focused program like ours. We care what industry is doing right now. Significant annual updates are normal, but now I question if that’s high enough frequency. What I would say today about agent assisted program would be very different than what I would have said back in October 2025.
• All of our programs have a team-oriented capstone projects where students work in agile teams using Scrum (1-week or 2-week sprints) to build a solution. For CS students it is a two-term project; for our IS and DATA students it is a one-term project. This lifecycle model is getting turned on its head in our new world: when coding is essentially “free”, the bottleneck becomes quality specification and prioritization. While this still aligns with the core of agile, it requires us to reconsider our overall approach. I did two presentations on this for our students: Part 1 and Part 2.
• Speaking of our senior CS capstone, we are going to run an experiment early next term and do an “all-in AI assisted sprint” to help students gain more experience and give them a chance to experience first-hand the new challenges and potentially big payoffs of this approach.
• The big question on our students’ minds: are there going to be jobs for junior (aka “early in career” or EiC) developers and IT professionals. We are working closely with our industry advisory board on this and preparing some hopefully helpful guidance for the graduating seniors. Friend and former colleague Scott Hanselman just co-authored a paper at the ACM on this topic: “Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI”. I’m bullish here but still think the hiring market will be challenging for a while.