Stanford's New Homework: Talk to Maintainers

🔥 What happened Mihail Eric overhauled his Stanford CS146S course: instead of nine assignments students could one-shot with an agent, they now contribute patches to open-source projects. Maintainers review the patches personally. 💡 Why it matters A survey in his class found every sophomore and junior already used coding agents. The new homework trains what agents can't do: figuring out whether the maintainer even wants the change. At Monaco, the team built its own agent workspaces because off-the-shelf products didn't fit. ⚡ Our take Treating agents as code cannons misses the point: the real work is the conversation with the maintainer. You can't prompt that.