One of the aims of the course 02160 “Agile Object-oriented Software Development” is to help students learn how to design and develop object-oriented software. This involves reading, analysing and writing code as part of a software team.

The course therefore aims at building a conceptual understanding of software development and therefore use of CoPilot and other Generative AI/LLM tools is discouraged.

The students are given science-backed reasons why it is NOT a good idea to use Generative AI to write code at this point in their professional development as well as good ways to use it after the course.

Basically:

  • You need to learn how to program before benefitting from LLM!
  • LLMs spit out code that, unless understood in depth, should not be trusted. Understanding the implications of code can be much more difficult than writing the code yourself
  • LLMs cannot really help for key elements of the course anyway. It is more about teamwork, communication, quality, and reliability

See the key slides here.