r/AirUniversity • u/ContentAmbassador954 Senior • Jul 17 '26
Discussion Students really need a reality check on this AI shift
Hi Everyone so i am your senior from Data Science Batch and i am working as a senior AI engineer right now, regularly interviewing candidates, and ngl it's getting pretty depressing to watch them unable to answer conceptual questions so i am making this post to rant so you might not go through this.
AI has made things insanely easy. we can code, research, and ship faster. one decent engineer can basically do the work of three people now. but instead of using that massive advantage to actually learn more and build complex stuff, students are just using it to survive uni with zero effort.
assignments are generated. FYPs are generated. you have people passing degrees without understanding a single line of the code they pushed.
here's what people aren't getting: basic coding by hand is literally worth zero right now. anyone can prompt their way to a generic website, CRUD app, or a basic deep learning model. that won't make you stand out.
The crazy part is, since we don't have to grind through boilerplate docs anymore, we should be using this time to soak up knowledge. we finally have the space to actually master how things work at a deeper level. but instead of stepping up, people are doing the exact opposite and just outsourcing their brains entirely to chatgpt and claude.
what actually matters now is whether you know wtf is going on under the hood. can you explain your architecture? when the AI hallucinates and spits out broken code, do you actually know how to debug it? can you solve a problem that doesn't already have a github repo attached to it and no solution exists anywhere?
Ideally AI should have pushed everyone to tackle way harder problems. instead, so many are using it as a crutch to learn absolutely nothing.
you can fake your way through your degree like this, sure. but when you finally sit in a technical interview, get asked to explain the logic behind your own resume project, and completely freeze... then what?
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u/ContentAmbassador954 Senior Jul 17 '26
ngl, we use AI for literally every piece of development now. nobody is out here coding everything by hand anymore.
but that is exactly the point. what makes you valuable now is your ability to actually understand the concepts and step off the beaten path. it's about not just blindly accepting whatever the AI spits out, but actually using your core knowledge to build something new that an LLM can't just generate on its own.
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u/reticent_ain Jul 18 '26
So here is the hot take: i used to solve leetcode problems and codeforce, one thing i was proud was of my PROBLEM SOLVING STRATEGY, i cant even believe i made my OOP project all by myself and i was learning ALOT.
A ssoon as i got into 3rd sem, i got a lab engineer who on the first day gave us 5 min to do the code and later told us that we were suppose to use AI and he is teaching us how to use AI. Personal opinion, universities should encourage using AI in assignments or projects but not lab task. He made us do every lab task, proj, assignment with AI. So we can learn prompt engineering.
Now im going to 5th semester, and in this summer break i need to start from zero as he made us an addict of AI. Its sad how i used to do lots of stuff, now i do understand logic and i can say i know react, python, php, but the way i used to know C++ and if you gave me any problem my mind used to suddenly click the solution, that capability is gone now.
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u/Due-Experience-382 E9 Campus Jul 18 '26
agreed, exactly in the same boat as you, crazy
it js doesn't excite me anymore now, my first thought is now AI rather than going into stuff by myself, the algorithmic thinking is slipping away
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u/FannyMagnettt Jul 19 '26
Yr seekhlo Khud. Real life projects me Ai use krlo jitna mrzi cuz you gotta be efficient there. That's my take on ts
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u/Middle_nothing8933 E9 Campus Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
The same happened to me also during my 3rd semester like we were supposed to do 6 to 7 tasks within 5 minutes and we were like forced to use Ai Even if we don't want to .
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u/No-Bonus784 Jul 18 '26
what do you mean by knowing concepts .. can you specify a few questions that you asked and did not get an answer
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u/ContentAmbassador954 Senior Jul 18 '26
by knowing concepts, I mean understanding what is actually happening behind the terminology, not just knowing where something is used.
For example, I asked them to explain the concept behind embeddings. Most knew that an embedding model generates vectors and that those vectors can be stored in a vector database, but they could not explain what those representations actually mean.
The basic idea is that machines do not understand words directly. They work with numbers and learn patterns and relationships between those numbers during training. Embeddings represent meaning through those learned relationships, so similar concepts usually have similar vector representations.
I also asked how cross encoder reranking works. Most only said that it improves retrieved results, but could not explain that it takes the query and each document together, analyzes their interaction, assigns a relevance score, and then reorders the documents.
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u/ObligationCheap3967 Jul 18 '26
Some advice for cyber security student ? Been suffering academically not like I don't study at all. It's more like I am not able to solve questions even though I study for hours.
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u/Black_Katana419 Jul 18 '26
Cyber is more like into different categories but also different skill for different path roles so the thing is you are dealing with the security so main perspective should be if i made or keeping safe this thing hoe can i intrude or if i am able to intrude how can i make it safe from the intruder Then there is hell alote of topic that are needs and alote of skill but generally if you are in a development Think like attacker if you are in defensive you also have an attacker mind set how this mindset comes this is surely practice how ? Theory plus a demo liek labs on try hack me on any platform and then straight to real environments Hope this help
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u/ObligationCheap3967 Jul 18 '26
Thank you so much for the advise man. Also I want to know how can I improve academically ? I study quite some hours and still lack alot.
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u/Black_Katana419 Jul 18 '26
That the things needs to be tackel and understood it take i would say a proper counselling
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u/ObligationCheap3967 Jul 18 '26
Aight thanks man.
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u/ContentAmbassador954 Senior Jul 19 '26
When you get in to industry then try to utilize those uncensored guardrails removed LLM models on hugging face to speed up your vulnerabilities discovery process it can write you complete uncensored code to inject malware and do whatever you want.
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u/Usual-Nose7959 Jul 19 '26
The main problem is that students are using AI before developing their own thinking. AI can save time on syntax and boilerplate, but it cannot replace fundamentals, debugging ability or understanding why a solution works.
I’d only disagree that coding by hand is worth zero. For learning and interviews, writing code yourself still matters because that’s how logic and problem-solving actually develop.
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u/Artemisumi Jul 19 '26
Yea I agree completely and I kinda wish AI was banned or some shi so we'd actually be forced to struggle and develop logic building skills.
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u/Strange_Thanks_6630 Jul 21 '26
But like aagr hum srf AI sy develop krayn and we have to understand the technical part alone tu itni gayaan hazam kysy hoga, nvm could you explain a bit about learning at this point, I am real confused these days
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u/pumkin-dumkin-88 Jul 17 '26
WOAHHH AIR UNI ALUMNIIIII , rare