Basically this. They already have vastly better-than-human ability at finding syntax errors within code, which on its own is quite useful; think of how many people have probably dropped out of CS as a major after staying up all night and failing to find a missing semicolon.
I started out in Cursor, but I quickly realized Claude's erudite knowledge of AWS would not help me here, but what I needed was to refactor the code quickly and often, so that I'd finally find the perfect structure.
For that, IDE tools were much more appropriate than AI wizardry.
These will do things like highlight places where you're trying to call a method that isn't defined on the object, but they don't understand the intent of what you're trying to do. The latter is actually important in terms of being able to point you toward the correct solution.
The foundation of a computer science education is a rigorous understanding of what the steps of an algorithm mean. If the students don't develop that, then I don't think they're doing computer science anymore.
I mean if the alternative is quitting entirely because they can't see that they've mixed tabs with spaces, then yes, it's very very helpful to their development.
I dropped out of cs half because I didn’t enjoy the coding because they dropped us into c++ and I found the error messages so confusing.
I discovered python five years later and discovered I loved coding.
( the other half of the reason is we spent two weeks designing an atm machine at a very abstract level and I thought the whole profession would be that boring.)
I think both editors have their flaws, I just know the native vi keybindings better at the moment.
This was about a million years ago. I had just installed a pirated copy of Windows XP (FCKGW-RHQQ2...) and was in the first quarter of my physics degree, taking a class in C. Different times....
... like a dozen? And in 100% cases it's their teacher's fault.