For what it's worth, most of the programming in the ML class when I took it last year was MATLAB based - since it mostly involved lots of linear algebra, and using MATLAB meant you got matrix operations for free. AI class, on the other hand, involved coding an increasingly more intelligent Pacman agent in Python as we learned new approaches to optimizing reward.

Having said that, taking ML definitely made my theory stronger - but this was mostly due to the amount of proofs in the class, and not so much the programming :)

Interesting point.

http://www.ai-class.com/overview says: "Programming is not required, however we believe it will be very helpful for some of the homework assignments. You may write code in any language you would like to (we recommend Python if you are new to programming) and your code will not be graded. For example, a question might ask for 6 answers to the same problem but with varied inputs or parameters. You are welcome to work each one out by hand, however writing a program might be both faster and give you a better understanding of how the algorithm works."

So there will be at least some programming, they got me confused - how is it possible to teach AI without programming? :) But we'll see.