The hottest Stanford computer science class isn't banning AI tools — it's embracing them (www.businessinsider.com)

Stanford’s new course, The Modern Software Developer, taught by alum Mihail Eric, is intentionally embracing AI coding tools rather than banning them. Framed as one of the university’s most popular classes this term, it teaches students how to build software using assistants like Cursor, Claude (and Claude Code) and agentic workflows instead of writing every line by hand. The class has brought in high-profile industry guests — including Boris Cherney, Gaspar Garcia, Silas Alberti, Zach Lloyd and Martin Casado — signaling a deliberate bridge between academic training and the tools shaping modern engineering practice. For the AI/ML community this is significant because it models a pragmatic pedagogy: train engineers to wield AI as amplifiers of productivity while preserving foundational skills. The course responds to market anxieties—CEOs and researchers are already reporting massive portions of code authored by AI (Microsoft ~30%; Anthropic’s prediction that AI could write “essentially all” code) — by emphasizing how to prompt, supervise, debug and integrate model-generated code. Employers and tool creators in the class argue these capabilities don’t yet replace developers but change the skill mix toward systems thinking, verification, and tool fluency. Eric plans to iterate the curriculum as models rapidly evolve, underscoring that software education will need continuous adaptation to remain relevant.