Tuesday, April 14, 2026

 

Good Morning!

Welcome to Spring quarter and to CS 3A. I'm sorry for the late welcome, I've been making my way back from Asia but I'm back and fully engaged. Well, perhaps a little bleary but ready to go.

I am excited to be working with you this quarter! I think you are going to learn a lot of great bits about coding, and also about using GitHub as a repository. 

Just a note that there are three items that are due today. They are each simple, but please take the time to make sure they are done.

  • Please post your introduction in the discussion forum, if you haven't already
  • Please take the academic integrity quiz. You can take it as many times as you like, but you must pass 100% before the rest of the class will open.
  • Please complete the first assignment. 

I'd like to say just a bit about AI. You could solve most...probably not all...of the assignments in this class just by plugging them into a chatbot. And I've been doing a lot of vibe coding lately, it's been very productive. My experience is that with a complicated project (i.e. one you would get paid for), AI can take you 90% of the way there. The other 10% will require you to know everything that folks needed to know before AI came around. And you won't get a job doing just that first 90%. 

So...you need to know this material, and I strongly encourage you to resist the temptation to copy the assignment into a chatbot. Also, that would go against my course policy. Instead I encourage you to use AI to help you understand a concept when you get stuck. "Can you show me an example of a for loop that uses both break and continue?" Or, once you have code that is 100% working, ask the chatbot what it would have done differently. But please, turn in your own code. PLEASE PLEASE ask questions if you are clear on the guidelines for AI usage.

Remember there are office hours on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesday (today) is in person on campus in the tutorial center, building 3600.

All right, let's get to work!

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  Good Morning! Welcome to Spring quarter and to CS 3A. I'm sorry for the late welcome, I've been making my way back from Asia but I...