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Comment by sayonidroy | Hacker News Reader

Online courses have stayed the same for decades. You read blogs, watch videos and you learn. That's it! But god forbid if you have a doubt --- brace yourself to sift through endless comments and discussions.

We at Edmigo deeply believe that this should change!

So, we've built an AI-tutor powered comprehensive DSA course at edmigo.in

In addition to quality materials, you get a personal tutor that can resolve all your unique doubts and help you code in LeetCode.

This is our first attempt to figure out if we can simplify online education. If you also believe that learning should not be this difficult, please check Edmigo out and give us some feedback.

Thanks :)

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Having done the MIT and Harvard CS courses on EDX.org I have to say that any course that doesn’t put you on a GitHub code space with auto-mated tests is a bad course.

I did them because I’m an external examiner for CS students and when I stated I wanted to brush up on all the stuff you learn during your first years, but I was blown away with how good they were. It has been a long time since so maybe they’ve changed.

I’d worry about AI tutors considering how often they get things blatantly wrong. In our internal statistics and analytics on AI assisted programming it’s a very bad option for “junior” programmers. Basically it reduces productivity by quite a lot, it also produces a lot more pull request rejections due to really bad code. On the flip-side, things like co-pilot makes experts in their field of programming sooooo much more efficient. What is really worrying though, is when LLMs get explanations completely wrong. Which means they are teaching the actually engineering wrong, and it can be years before it gets “fixed” if it ever does. I’ve worked in plenty of places where people would never be challenged on wrong knowledge. Often because their co-workers simply didn’t know any better either.

Yeah but this is really a cottage industry. If companies didn't expect applicants to grind leetcode this ai tutor wouldn't exist. The tutor isn't there to actually teach or innovate education in any way (as the authors claim in another post). It's there to reduce the friction between unemployment and employment.

> In our internal statistics and analytics on AI assisted programming it’s a very bad option for “junior” programmers. Basically it reduces productivity by quite a lot, it also produces a lot more pull request rejections due to really bad code. On the flip-side, things like co-pilot makes experts in their field of programming sooooo much more efficient.

There's been a study already. "AI" assisted beginners learned ... about nothing compared to the control beginners group. I think it was linked here on HN.

A LLM might help if it does not give you code but only answers short questions. Unless it's as good as those support chatbots.

we totally agree that AI giving you coding solutions doesn't help. So Edmigo never provides solutions unless explicitly requested. Instead it gives hints to help learners think

It would get banned from StackOverflow then :)

I must not have expressed myself clear enough, sorry English isn’t my first language. What I meant was actually the opppsite or what you say. AI is fancy auto-complete for programmers who know when to ignore it. It’s terrible at answering questions. It will tell you the most amazing things about how computers work. I know it’s not that different from Google programming, probably even more accurate, but the key difference we’ve found is that people tend to trust the AI more than what they find on Google.

> brace yourself to sift through endless comments and discussions.

That's half the fun!

Haha! That's an interesting way to look at it

i've done a few on coursera, and they've added an AI to talk with, which seems OK.

can't say much about other sites.

GL with your course :)

Thanks for the feedback

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