Here is a very interesting read: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/the-death-of-the-junior-developer -- it is worth the 20 minutes to read the whole thing. "The Mangler" and "Cabin in the Woods" sections that are specifically why we are not letting students use genAI in their Capstone projects. We had projects in both of the last 2 semesters where the students literally couldn't complete their projects because they solely relied on genAI and were totally unable to fix the hallucinations and flat-out wrong code that was generated.

The last section of that blog post, "Final Destination", is a good summary. The author does encourage the use of GenAI, but I think the Capstone part of this picture is that we're focusing on one narrow slice of it: "Get good, fast. That's what you need to do. Get ahead of the slackers while our industry turns upside down, and you might be the one to survive." I.e., have the students get at least an overview of the core skills and learn the ability to think and understand. The use of GenAI will come after this class -- learn how to think and understand first.

As someone deep into the AI space and very bullish on its adoption. I think it's very much the right call to prevent AI in school work. You need to set a foundation of general knowledge and principles. It's like understanding what a derivative and integral are in math by doing things manually when there are clearly calculators and programs around. The tools should supplement the fundamental knowledge, not replace it entirely. And if students want to get in the super high level development in the future, understanding the reasoning and having a good foundation of the manual things is even more important

I agree in theory and disagree in practice. I think it is fundamental to learn and understand the rationale and theory as long as the ability to apply and practice are being provided. If the students are getting the opportunity to learn these tools and use them in other areas of their education maybe this is fine. If you aren't allowing them to use it during the capstone PERIOD I think you have missed an opportunity. These tools are not going away. They are currently the worst they will ever be. Teaching your students how and when to use them is crucial. Teaching them how to do it in a professional setting and for creating an end-to-end deployed projects even more so. It is important that students understand how to work with the technology not rely on it. If the capstones previously were being 100% generated and the student couldn't complete the project they either were not properly understanding how to use it or weren't taught how to correctly use it. Imagine doing your job today without the internet, or without an IDE. We are approaching a fundamental shift in how development in practice works. There is a very real difference between a research engineer and a practicing software engineer and the associated learning and education between the two.