Programming

Recently, a student came into my office. They were having a problem getting their assignment to work. I asked what they had tried, and they said “I tried Claude, I tried Gemini, and I tried ChatGPT.” This was a very concerning interaction to me. What bothered me was not the AI use (which is allowed by course policy), but that the student didn’t have a good process for making progress once they were stuck. As we worked through this student’s problem, it became clear that they were not developing a mental model of what the problem was, or trying to break the problem up into smaller problems, but instead were trying to solve the problem all at once with a single prompt to an LLM. I call this anti-pattern “slot machine programming,” where the student just kept re-using the prompt hoping the next answer would be correct. Similar to playing slot machines, where each play is statistically independent from the last, running the same prompt through different AI tools doesn’t help a student make progress towards a solution.