The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026(missing.csail.mit.edu)

457 points by anishathalye 84 days ago | 132 comments

We returned to MIT last month to teach a revised version of Missing Semester, six years after the original debut (which has been extensively discussed on HN, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22226380 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934216).

We’ve updated the course based on our personal experiences as well as major changes in the field (e.g., the proliferation of AI-powered developer tools) over the past several years. The 2026 course includes revised versions of four lectures from the previous course, and it adds five entirely new lectures:

- Development Environment and Tools

- Packaging and Shipping Code

- Agentic Coding

- Beyond the Code (soft skills)

- Code Quality

We’d love to hear any feedback from the HN community to improve the current or future iterations of the course. In particular, we’re curious to hear the community’s take on our inclusion of AI-related topics (e.g., dedicating an entire class to the topic of agentic coding; though we tried to counterbalance it with plenty of disclaimers, and a dedicated section on AI etiquette in Beyond the Code).

--Anish, Jon, and Jose

NoNameHaveI 83 days ago |

I'm glad to see there is a "Beyond the Code" section that discusses comments. Here's what I typically told my students in Intro to Programming" Good comments lend insight into the code. Reading the code itself tells you the what. Comments should explain the why. Comments like "i+=1; /* Increment i */" are of little value. However comments such as "We increment i mid loop so that we can peek ahead at the next value for a possible swap" are more useful. Use a narrative voice when writing comments, like you are explaining the code to your grandparent. This make digestion easier. Remember, code spends most of its life, and most of its expense, in the maintenance phase. The easier you make your code to understand, the less it will cost and the longer it will live.

dec0dedab0de 83 days ago | |

I prefer comments like "I'm sorry about this, I know it's ugly but I'm in a rush and it's the quickest way to get it working"

stronglikedan 82 days ago | | |

As long as there's a "TODO" tag in the comment to easily search for, then I prefer those comments as well.

jimbokun 82 days ago | | |

Would your Grandma approve of you introducing that technical debt?

That’s why it’s important to write comments as if to your grandparents. For the feelings of accountability that it engenders.

Hendrikto 83 days ago |

Great to see a chapter on version control. It is such a shame that almost no CS program teaches proper version control. VCSs and the commit history can be such a tremendously valuable tool when used correctly.

git bisect/blame/revert/rebase/… become so much less useful when VC is treated as a chore and afterthought, and basically amounts to: “Feature is done, my work is complete, just do `git commit -am "changes"` and be done with it.”. And don’t get me started on commit messages.

It is shameful that for a large part of the industry, this is the norm. It is shameful that for a lot of professional, who call themselves software architects or reliability engineers and such fancy titles, still have essentially no idea what they are doing with git, and their response when git add/commit/push/pull don’t work is to shrug, and just delete and re-clone the repo.

Version control should be treated with care and attention to detail. It pays for itself 100 times over.

If your commit history is maintained and tells a story, it is a joy to review your PR. If you just `git commit -am "try fix"` 26 times over, and all that is left in the end is a ball of mud, it is horrible.

xml 83 days ago | |

If most people are not using a tool properly, it is not their fault; it is the tool's fault.

Git is better than what came before, and it might be the best at what it does, but that does not mean that it is good.

- The interface is unintuitive.

- Jargon is everywhere.

- Feature discoverability is bad.

- Once something goes wrong, it is often more difficult to recover. If you're not familiar enough with Git to get yourself into that situation, then you certainly aren't familiar enough to get yourself out of it.

Many of those issues are due to git being a command line interface, but others (like no general undo and funny names) are simply due to bad design.

I think it is about time that we try again and build a better version control tool, but maybe git is just too entrenched.

shagie 83 days ago | | |

> If most people are not using a tool properly, it is not their fault; it is the tool's fault.

I would say that is a reasonable criticism of git ... but I've seen the same thing in svn, perforce, cvs, and rcs. Different variations of the same issue of people not caring about the version history.

Since it's been a problem since the dawn of version control, it is either something that is part of all version control being a tool's fault that has been carried with it since doing ci, or it is something that people aren't caring about.

I feel this is more akin to a lack of comments in code and poor style choices and blaming the text editor for not making it easier to comment code.

cameronh90 83 days ago | | |

> If most people are not using a tool properly, it is not their fault; it is the tool's fault.

This is a standard that we don't apply to most other tools outside of IT. I do think git could be more usable, but most powerful tools have sharp edges and require training.

A bandsaw is a fantastic tool, but if you try to use one without reading about it first, you'll end up losing a finger. I'm not sure I'd blame the bandsaw in that instance...

netdevphoenix 83 days ago | | |

> If most people are not using a tool properly, it is not their fault; it is the tool's fault.

Replace tool with one of piano|guitar|etc and see your logic fall apart. Software tools like any other have a manual and require effort and time to learn.

1718627440 83 days ago | | |

The hardest thing to get people to, is to think of a evolution of their codebase as opposed to just a single state with a sophisticated backup system. Writing proper commit messages and diffs follows from that. The actual Git commands are then incidentally.

tech_tuna 80 days ago | | |

Git is better in some ways, but it is insanely complicated. That matters less now with AI tooling but still there was a time when we all had many choices (commercial and open source) for source control tools. My canonical example is git checkout -b <branch_name> for a new branch, git branch -D <branch_name> to delete the local branch and git push origin :<branch_name>.

I know that that is the old syntax but holy hell, that's insane. Why couldn't it always have been git branch --create|delete|delete-remote? It could have but Linus doesn't care about your feelings or small brain. :)

owlstuffing 83 days ago | | |

Right on. Git is good at what it does, but its CLI is too low-level. It feels more like an assembly language than an end-user language, and a haphazard one at that.

There are wrappers that make it much more approachable. IntelliJ’s Git frontend, for example, is pretty nice.

janalsncm 82 days ago | | |

Git has poor design because it forces users to learn its model of things rather than meeting users where they are. There’s way too many leaky abstractions that pop out as soon as you stray from the happy path, and you might not even know you’re straying when you do it.

Instead, the complexity of your mental model should scale with the complexity of the thing you’re trying to do. Writing a “hello world” in Java does not require a mental model of all of the powerful things Java can do.

We want CS 101 students to use version control but for a lot of them it will also be their first time using a CLI and a programming and also the underlying CS concept.

intended 83 days ago | | |

For UI/UX arguments on professional grade software, I present the Bloomberg terminal. A fever dream in shades of orange, black and blue.

For professional work, people can and do learn complex interfaces and jargon, if it is advantageous.

krupan 83 days ago | | |

Very true, though it has improved a over the years. Most people haven't noticed because when git has introduced newer simpler commands it hasn't deprecated the old ones. You can now use it like this, but most people don't know it:

git switch some-branch # edit files git restore file2 # undo changes to file2 git stage file1 git commit

Instead of the old workflow using checkout with a bunch of different flags.

I agree though that git is needlessly obtuse. I advocated for mercurial instead of git for years because mercurial was so much more user friendly, but git won. I hear good things about jj now

jimbokun 82 days ago | | |

I haven’t used jj but isn’t that exactly what it’s meant to be?

I believe git is architecturally sound and well designed, but the command line syntax can be overly confusing and opaque.

marcosdumay 83 days ago | | |

Git is badly designed, but your rule is also bad.

If somebody can get a lot done with a tool, then it's a good tool. And a lot of tools can't both enable people to get things done and avoid being misused. They have to pick one.

npinsker 83 days ago | |

This feels harsh. Engineers have an endless list of other things to learn that are arguably more important, and it isn’t always worth understanding all the weird edge cases that almost never pop up (to say nothing of Git’s hostile, labyrinthine UX that one would have to deal with).

HelloNurse 83 days ago | | |

What things to learn are more important for "engineers" than using VC messages and history for communicating adequately (including communicating with themselves in the future) and using VC merging, staging etc. to put source code in a good state that they intend to build, share and archive? Irreproducible or incomprehensible work is worse than nothing.

gcr 83 days ago | | |

It's absolutely worth taking the time to learn `jj`, for example, but `jj`'s ideas build on top of `git`'s ideas. If you don't know why it's important that commits reference their parents, for example, that's limiting your knowledge of how VCS works in important ways.

A compromise/synthesis: everyone should absolutely learn how git works internally, but not necessarily how to use the git-specific porcelain/tooling/CLI

zerkten 83 days ago | |

A big part of the problem is being permitted to teach this stuff. As a UK CS grad from the early-2000s, my observation was that academic staff recognized the need for these skills. They weren't permitted to teach it due to time available and the view that it wasn't academic. Thankfully, my university's CS department offered courses in these kinds of topics taught by the support staff (read: sysadmins). These courses existed to help other departments with skills but were open to students.

Fast forward twelve years and my wife did the MCIT at UPenn (https://catalog.upenn.edu/graduate/programs/computer-informa...) where git and other topics woven into the curriculum. Even then, they were perhaps a novelty because their focus was bringing non-CS undergrads into a CS Masters program. So-called "conversion" master's degrees were the norm in the UK in 2002.

TonyStr 83 days ago | |

It seems most people learn git only through necessity. I've heard people say "I just want to code, I don't care about the peripherals". JIT learning is a good way to acquire capabilities with real-world application, but there is not JIT pull that forces people to learn about bisect, git objects, git logging, etc. These things can only be learnt either through setting off time to read documentation or by being taught through a course.

I think this is a good argument for teaching git, and being thorough in doing so, as many people are likely to never take that initiative themselves, while the benefits to being good at git are so obvious.

Anonyneko 83 days ago | | |

I think most people learn git through the particular processes that are established at their workplace, as every company uses git or VCS in general differently somehow.

stackghost 83 days ago | | |

>It seems most people learn git only through necessity. I've heard people say "I just want to code, I don't care about the peripherals"

I'm sure there's an element of (intellectual) laziness too, but I think people tend to only learn git by necessity because git is simply unpleasant to use.

A lot of us have Stockholm syndrome because git is less bad than what came before it, but git is not good.

skydhash 83 days ago | | |

I see this enough that I don’t bother ranting about it. There’s the free “Pro Git” (on the git homepage) that will teach you most of what you”ll need in a lifetime. But you tell people about rebase and the reflog and their eyes glaze over.

AnimalMuppet 83 days ago | |

Version control isn't the only thing like that (though it might be the most important). They ought to have some familiarity with the idea of a bug database, for example. A requirements database (a software engineer could go through their entire career without having to ever touch one, but they should be familiar with the idea).

sigbottle 83 days ago | |

I have heard of each of those tools but I've never really used them for real.

Like, I attempt to write good commit messages and stage my changes in such a way that the commits are small, obvious, and understandable. That's about it. But the advanced tooling around git is scary ngl.

oytis 83 days ago | | |

My rite of passage towards git kung-fu was committing to Linux kernel. It's brutal there, you have to have your history really clean.

Meanwhile enterprise teams are often like - who cares, let's auto-squash all commits into one.

krupan 83 days ago | |

So much this. Once you get beyond the very basics, git is a code editing tool as much as your editor/ide is

sh34r 83 days ago | |

Your workflow makes sense for FOSS projects, where the commit is the unit of work. In my experience, on most professional teams, the PR is the unit of work. PRs trigger CI/CD pipelines. PRs map to tickets. The meaningful commit goes with the squash merge to the shared dev/main branch.

There are cases where I've staged commits this way for a PR, to make it more reviewable. I'd usually rather split them off into separate PRs, but when that would create a pipeline of three MRs that are meaningless on their own, then rewriting history for a single MR makes sense. I generally consider my feature branch's commit history to be for me, not for you. Going back and rewriting history is a chore that shouldn't be necessary if I did a decent enough job with the PR description and task decomposition. Those commits are getting squashed anyway. Along with all the "fix MR comments" commits on top of it.

It wouldn't bother me to adopt your workflow if it fits your team and its tools and processes. I'd just say, consider that your way isn't the only correct way of doing things. Your preferences are valid, but so are others'. The only thing that really bothers me is absolutism. "My way or the highway."

Your writing here reminded me of a particularly unpleasant coworker I had in the past. I quickly browsed your comment history to make sure you're not him... Excessive rigidity is not an endearing quality.

All that being said, I have also been constantly annoyed by people with too many YoE who can't be bothered to spend an hour or three to learn the basics of how the Git tree is structured, and what merge vs rebase does. They rely too heavily on their GUI crutches and can't fix anything once it goes sideways. Even when you lead them to water, sending them reading material and offering to answer questions after, they refuse to drink. Willful ignorance is far more irritating than stubbornness. I don't expect them to be able to remember what bisect vs cherry-pick does. Claude will spit out the subcommands for them if they can describe what they need in English. But they can't do that if they have no understanding of the underlying data structures...

esafak 83 days ago | |

This might be a good time to teach jujitsu, before they're too invested in git.

barnacs 83 days ago | |

I don't think using git should necessarily be taught as a part of a CS education. Any self respecting engineer will be capable and have the curiosity and motivation to dig into it on their own. CS should give them the prereqs to do so, such as hashing, graphs, trees, etc.

Stevvo 83 days ago | |

"Almost no CS program teaches proper version control"

This is just false. In the UK, you would learn version control in the first week, then submit all work through version control for the whole course.

I find it hard to believe that Americans just don't use version control at school. It doesn't make any sense.

Hendrikto 82 days ago | | |

> It doesn't make any sense.

Exactly. But that is sadly the state of things.

pards 83 days ago |

One of my large enterprise clients currently requires all tech staff to complete 18h (yes, eighteen hours!) of "agile training", in addition to speed-running 14 separate mandatory online courses.

This time would be much better spent watching these 9h of lectures.

projektfu 83 days ago |

I'd include sed and awk, because these tools are ubiquitous and can accomplish in a few readable lines what people write long programs to handle in other languages, seemingly because they are unaware of sed and awk, don't know how to use them, or are required for some reason to do it in the project language.

In fact, generally teaching people to select the right tool for the job is a good skill to prevent them from using golden hammers.

Arun2009 83 days ago |

Just wondering - do you include information on interviewing, salary negotiation, communication with management, leading teams, and maybe topics on career progression?

These would have been very useful to me back when I was in the university.

Jonhoo 83 days ago | |

Not at the moment, but it's a good idea for the next iteration of the class!

ontouchstart 83 days ago |

When I was a Physics Ph.D. student in NYU in the late nineties, I took a course called UNIX tools in the CS department. It was a hands on course where the instructor did live REPL in the terminal and we watched him showing us all the tricks. I got hooked with UNIX since then. Got myself a dialup terminal in my tiny apartment in east village and dial in to the workstation on campus. The latency is so bad that I can’t only see the feedback after a few keystrokes. That was when I trained my vi muscle memory. (EMacs was out of the question.)

Later I got my own IBM 386 and installed Linux on it and started to program in Perl …

I am a big fan of Jon’s YouTube videos on Rust and I started to use Rust in non conventional ways.

I am going to follow this lecture series and “port” them to rustdoc and see how it goes.

Another rabbit hole to fall down, it is going to be fun.

https://ontouchstart.github.io/rabbit-holes/missing/

0xbadcafebee 83 days ago |

If you want to master the shell (it will save years of your life), follow these guides. I highly recommend reading the entire BASH manual, it will answer every question you'll ever have, or at least give you a hint about it, as well as expose you to all the hidden knowledge (some call it "gotchas") you'll wish you knew later.

  101
  - Bash for Beginners (https://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/)
  - Bash Tutorial (https://www.w3schools.com/bash/)

  201
  - Bash Programming (https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html)
  - Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/)

  301
  - The Bash Manual (https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html) (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/bash.1.html)
  - ShellCheck (https://www.shellcheck.net/)

To find every Unix-y program and get a 1-line description of it (and referenced programs/functions), run:

  for i in $(ls /bin/* /usr/bin/* /sbin/* /usr/sbin/* | sed -E 's?.*/??g' | sort -u) ; do
    echo "command: $i"
    whatis "$(basename "$i")" | cat
    echo ""
  done | tee command-descriptions.log

View 'command-descriptions.log' with less command-descriptions.log, use arrow-keys and page up/down to navigate, and type 'q' to exit. To find out more about a program like df(1), run man 1 df.

e12e 82 days ago | |

I think looking at some of the documentation for oils (née oil sh) and ysh - as well as [looking at using] these two projects [in place of bash] - is also a good idea today:

https://oils.pub/

zahlman 82 days ago | |

I think I would do it more like:

  find /bin/ /usr/bin/ /sbin/ /usr/sbin/ -executable -type f -exec whatis "$(basename {})" \; | sort -u > commands.txt

0xbadcafebee 82 days ago | | |

You would need to make those double-quotes into single-quotes. Double-quotes will interpolate the $() immediately, running basename before find runs. Single-quotes will not interpolate the $(), so the whole string gets passed to find for it to execute each time

ILoveHorses 83 days ago |

Not an entire semester, but I'm really glad my uni had a semester long core CS course on exactly this. Still one of the most useful courses I've ever taken, I refer my notes from that class even now.

whateveracct 83 days ago |

Purdue CompE has long had a 1 credit hour course that is just this. Lots of bash and git and then a little Python and Tkinter at the end. Other courses them assumed we had this knowledge - the 300-level ASIC class had us submit assignments by pushing to a remote, for instance. Definitely one of the most useful credit hours I had.

andersmurphy 83 days ago |

Is this going to be like when Sun paid universities to use/teach Java? Just with Anthropic and LLMs?

dmurray 83 days ago | |

I don't think students in 2026 need any encouragement to use LLMs, but sure, it would be strange if the LLM companies didn't give away student plans cheaply.

Cerium 83 days ago | | |

I don't see the lock in effect (such as learning a language, or a complex software product) with LLMs yet that would drive student based marketing efforts.

tovej 83 days ago |

I would focus more on being able to follow the development of new and existing foundational technologies, rather than focusing on, say agentic coding. That one really sticks out as a trendy topic that doesn't really deserve to be included.

qsort 83 days ago |

> In particular, we’re curious to hear the community’s take on our inclusion of AI-related topics

I think this is fine and if anything you should give it more space. It doesn't replace foundational understanding, but the course is explicitly about "practical" aspects, we can assume said foundational understanding is developed in other courses.

Something like "build your own agent" would be a great intuition pump. The model is doing the heavy lifting and a basic harness is a couple hundred lines of simple code. It could fit in a single lecture and it would be very high signal in my opinion.

badc0ffee 83 days ago |

At first, the purple links had me convinced that I'd already clicked on them.

caillou 83 days ago |

In terms of shell, I moved to the fish shell 5 years ago.

Things are so much easier. No need to a massive amount of plugins and configs, mostly works out of the box.

e12e 82 days ago | |

Fish is probably a good idea for an interactive shell. Osh/ysh might be a good idea for scripting:

https://oils.pub/

I'm still using bash out of habit, though. My one nod to modern tooling is using fzf for shell history search...

BeetleB 83 days ago | |

xonsh user for 8 years here :-)

I agree that these shells are better than bash, etc. But some bash knowledge is probably a must, given its ubiquity. You're not always going to have the option to install fish.

(Sadly, most of my jobs, including my current one, require tcsh).

ghc 83 days ago |

That's actually brilliant! Most of my classes only taught what tools were needed to accomplish coursework, not generally useful tools. Even our OS class focused on the workings of the kernel, not the Unix philosophy and how it influenced what tools were included, and how to use them. Then again, 20 years ago the year of the linux desktop was much farther away than it is today...

lordnacho 83 days ago |

In some way this could be the most important course.

You don't appreciate it when you're studying, because obviously it sounds a bit soft. But when you're learning how something works, often the thing that stops you isn't the fundamentals, which you know what are, it's the little frustrations like not knowing how to commit or pull code, or not knowing how to navigate the terminal.

btreecat 82 days ago |

I think we might need to take a hard look at the higher end path of CS and ask why we're not focused more on Software Engineering.

Research is great, but if wre trying to train people to make real things, there's a whole different set of skills where you only need a thin vineer of CS training and a deeper understanding of software maintenance.

pbnjeh 80 days ago |

One bit of very simple feedback. Keep the prior/older versions online. 1) There’s value in older (e.g. pre-AI) perspectives and tools; 2) Different presentations/wording may click better with different people; 3) Links to them won’t break.

Thanks!

ludicrousdispla 83 days ago |

Personal hygiene is worth a mention.

kkfx 83 days ago |

I have a bit of unsolicited feedback (in this terms): the basic IT skills, not CS or CE, but IT, that everyone needs but most don't realize, including techies who often stay in their bubble and don't truly understand the classic desktop model despite having the skills to do so, are a bit different IMVHO:

- first of all, you need to know how to manage your own digital information. Even though it's taken for granted that a CS/CE freshman knows this, well, in my experience, that's usually not the case also for many PhD... Information management isn't just a taxonomy of files and dirs; it's also about evaluating, for example, what happens if the software you use for your notes is discontinued, or if your photo gallery disappears, and so on, and acting accordingly knowing your SPOFs and how to mitigate them;

- then you need to know how to write, in the broadest sense, which includes mathematical notation, generating graphs, "freehand" drawing like simple CAD, and formatting your work for various purposes and media, whether it's emails, theses, reports, or general messages. This is where teaching LaTeX, org-mode, R/Quarto, etc comes in. It's not "advanced" is the very basic. Before learning to program and no, Office suites are not an answer, they are monsters from a past era, made to makes untrained human with little culture to use a computer for basic stuff instead of typewriters, a student is not that;

- you need to know how to crunch numbers. Basic statistics are useful, but they're largely stuck in another era. You need to know how to do math on a computer, symbolic computation, whether it's Maxima or SymPy, doesn't really matter, and statistical processing basis. For instance, knowing Polars/Plotly/* at a minimum level are basic skills a freshman should have at a software/operational level, because they should be working in these environments from day one, given that these are the epistemological tools of the present, not paper anymore.

Then you also need to manage code, but in the broadest sense. A dSCM is also for managing your own notes and documents, not just software, and you need to know how to share these with others, whether it's Radicle or Forgejo or patches vua mail doesn't really matter, but this family of software needs to be introduced and used at least at a basic level. A DynDNS services should be also given so anyone could try to self-host the services they want.

Knowing how to communicate is an essential skill, and it's not about using Gmail or Zoom... it's about learning how to self-host basic communication services. It doesn't really matter if it's XMPP, Matrix, or Nostr, but the concept must be clear, and understanding the distributed and decentralized options we have today is vital. A student needs to learn how to stand on their own two feet, not on someone else's servers.

These are basic IT skills that aren't "advanced" at all, despite what many people think, or "sysadmin-level" and so on; they're simply what a freshman should have as someone who loves knowledge and wants to get their hands dirty.

cd4761 81 days ago |

The original shell scripting lecture changed how I think about automation. Curious what the five new lectures cover.

stevetron 83 days ago |

How about including a course in touch-typing that emphasizes the computer keyboard rather than the typewrite keyboard?

Obscurity4340 79 days ago | |

Dvorak++

blks 82 days ago |

I would omit agentic “coding” all together.

a-dub 83 days ago |

maybe would be interesting to include a lecture on how to interact with the open source community and successfully contribute to an open source project while respecting maintainer time and energy (and other unwritten rules of (n)etiquette).

edit: already in the "beyond the code" section... cool!

__mharrison__ 83 days ago |

Huge blindspot, especially with all the AI coding going on now... Testing

shimman 83 days ago |

Honestly shocked ethics aren't discussed more as the "missing semester," too many devs are completely fine working for truly evil companies.

anishathalye 83 days ago | |

MIT already has an excellent class on Ethics for Engineers: https://e4e.mit.edu/

shimman 83 days ago | | |

Clearly failing the students seeing how they still work for evil companies.

bruce343434 83 days ago | |

Is a moral compass something you can teach someone in a short course if they have been lacking it so far in their entire lives?

wps 83 days ago | |

Especially considering proper licensed engineers often due have to take engineering ethics courses as part of their program.

ThrowawayR2 83 days ago |

I'd suggest adding software testing and QA, particularly with the rise in AI and agentic coding requiring better testing skills, but that would deserve an entire separate course all of its own.

tovej 83 days ago | |

I would hope any CS/Software engineering education would already include QA. Both a testing course and a general software quality course.

DaBarrington 80 days ago |

I bailed the second I saw AI mentioned, I'd rather learn to do things myself than ask chatgpt to hallucinate up a program for me. I am really hoping AI goes the way of the NFT soon and humanity goes back to actually creating stuff themselves.

I'd ask chatgpt if the AI bubble will pop any time soon but it will probably tell me something unrelated and/or completely incorrect and I would just have to go find the answer on Google anyway. Maybe I should ask chatgpt if any of these AI companies will ever manage to make it out of the red.

dvfjsdhgfv 82 days ago |

As it's hosted on CSAIL, I was somewhat disappointed by the code quality section:

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/code-quality/

Although it's specifically code quality, not software quality, I feel so much is missing. Of course there is no space to explain it in detail, but they could at least list/mention things like complexity, maintainability, modularity etc.

ontouchstart 82 days ago | |

I am not at lecture 9 yet. I would love to follow their journey at human pace just like I did 30 years ago.

I do think your point is valid. The trend in the industry is putting emphasis on cosmetic qualities (format, workflow, testing), producing huge amount of metadata that consumes huge amount of human and machine energy for the peace of mind.

Complexity, maintainability, modularity have more to do with thinking about the problems at proper abstraction levels.

It seems we ended up spending more time on tools like writers spending more time on sharpening pencils or playing with fonts than writing something meaningful.

A low quality software can have beautiful code just like a low quality book has beautiful fonts.

ontouchstart 82 days ago | |

I watched this YouTube video

Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCr_gb8rdEI

I was surprised that he only spent four months on it as a maintainer. What a great piece of work by a great software developer.

DGAP 83 days ago |

This is great but irrelevant in the age of ai.

cratermoon 83 days ago |

I didn't even have to look to know that they'd added a section on AI sloperators.

Want my feedback? Delete the AI bullshit and go back to teaching programmers how to learn and understand what they are building.

vibecodingfraud 82 days ago |

To watch

bigstrat2003 82 days ago |

I would remove the AI stuff entirely. At best it's not useful for students to learn about AI, at worst it's actively harmful (because they will rely on it and never learn). AI isn't yet to the point where it's actually a useful tool, so it doesn't make sense to devote learning time to it.

mono442 83 days ago |

Is there even a point learning CS now with the rapid progress of agentic coding? It seems like a complete waste of money and time.

nautilus12 83 days ago |

Lol, does any of this matter anymore with AI coding? It was hard to get people to care about this sort of thing before ai coding, now its impossible. People in a few years will be coding without even knowing what unix is.