I teach and absolutely must be able to disable AI for my student projects otherwise the students learn very little and are lead down false paths constantly

I guarantee your students are going to learn how to delete the .noai file

Of course. As I tell them: I am a good teacher and my job is to teach you how to program computers well. It is possible to cheat and get a good grade in this class. If I catch you, I will report you to the university. But I'm not going to work hard to catch people, that's not my job: my job is to teach. You should learn.

My concern isn't for students who are cheaters, there isn't much I can do about them. Rather it is for students who don't know any better and start having AI auto-completion thrown at them.

How many students rely on AI, is that number really going up?

My son is 14 and knows about AI (I'm a researcher in the space, so I've been mentioning advances in it for years). He seems to code with some of his peers, and it seems like normal to me (python scripts, HTML, js type stuff written the old fasioned way [written by hand or copy pasting into a notebook.exe equivalent :P]). I try to be super honest with him, and I tell him AI is incredible, but we also joke about it and I explain the incredible drawbacks of vibe coding, especially while learning.

I wonder overall though how LLMs are going to effect CS education. Will students avoid using the tools, or will they be accepted? CS homework projects were always easier to cheat on vs say fine art, since of the ease one can copy and paste code, but AI tools makes trivial work of many homework exercises that would in theory be harder to implicate someone.

Yes, it is going up. In my classes the problem is that AI is just there in VSCode or IntelliJ, and they start using it almost by accident. That is what I want to avoid.

Tons of cheaters existed pre-ai too. They'll always exist, whether they use ai or just share copy pasted code from students who attended the semester before. Probably half of my graduating class couldn't program because they cheated their way through.

Yep.

Sin is its own punishment.