March 16, 2026
CS 2026: Welcome to Prompt School
Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
Big Tech ghosted campus, AI writes homework, profs freak out
TLDR: A guest lecturer says students think Big Tech stopped recruiting and AI now blurs what counts as real work. Commenters split between “core CS is fine, cheating got easier” and “AI is gutting programs,” highlighting real stakes for degrees, jobs, and what college is even teaching anymore.
Hacker News lit up after a guest lecturer said today’s computer science students feel Big Tech has vanished from campus recruiting and Wall Street trading shops are poaching the best. The vibe? Gloomy, spicy, and very online. One commenter kicked it off with a dry quip — “lots of chatgpt i assume” — and the thread snowballed into tales of AI-everywhere classrooms and capstone projects that feel outdated before midterms. Some students say the degree they waited for now looks like “AI studies,” with one lamenting that almost everything feels “infested with AI.”
But not everyone’s crying into their code. A pragmatic crowd fired back: the core of CS hasn’t changed; what’s changed is testing and the temptation to cheat. One insider says schools ditched big final exams for constant quizzes, then watched “students blatantly submit ChatGPT” anyway. Professors themselves are using AI and don’t know what counts as a “complex project” anymore — a semester-long build can be a weekend with the right prompts. Meanwhile, mid-tier programs are “decimated,” claims another, with instructors telling students to just ask the bot. The fight rages on Hacker News: is this the end of CS-as-we-knew-it or just a messy, meme-filled transition?
Key Points
- •A guest lecturer at CMU reports observations from interactions with CS students and faculty at top schools.
- •Students perceive reduced on-campus recruiting by big tech firms like Google, Meta, and Amazon.
- •Jane Street and Two Sigma are perceived as actively recruiting and attracting CS talent.
- •Professors struggle to redefine capstone and project complexity in light of modern tools.
- •AI is used by professors and expected of students, but rapidly evolving capabilities complicate assignment difficulty and course design.