iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Joe, this article reminds me of the exact same motivation text we wrote in your papers ~12 years ago! dev.to/maame-codes/...

He set a timer for 20 minutes. "The agent says this payment gateway refactor is 'Successful.' My logs say otherwise. Tell me why the machine is lying to me."

I sat there staring at the most "perfect" code I’d ever seen. No typos. Perfect indentation. But I froze. I spent my labs at Uni learning how to create loops, not how to find a microscopic logic flaw in a "perfect" hallucination.

150

Joe Gibbs Politz @joepolitz.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Should just do Captain Teach again but mix agent code in. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Second, at a more principled level, we (controversially!)
view code availability as a valuable learning opportunity for
students, in that it reflects modern software practice. Sites
such as StackOverflow and blogs give programmers ready
access to code for various tasks; the problem for users is to
assess whether the code they find is worth copying. Captain-
Teach anonymizes the work being reviewed, so students can-
not rely on the reputation of authors when deciding whether
to follow ideas seen in other students’ work; instead, they
must judge the code itself. If they make a correct judge-
ment, this demonstrates learning and a corresponding im-
provement in their grade. However, they may also copy a
wrong solution (even one we used to seed the system, which
can look quite convincing!), so copying blindly is perilous.

111

Joe Gibbs Politz @joepolitz.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

I think a critical thing pedagogically is that students got code to review *after attempting it themselves*, which requires some structure to encourage/enforce. My current syllabus wording about AI says... 1/

130