Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college
- Reference: 1771018964
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/13/anthropic_claudeifies_comp_sci_courses/
- Source link:
The project aims to Claude-ify more than 20,000 students at community colleges, state schools, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
According to Anthropic, more than 40 percent of CodePath students come from families earning less than $50,000 a year, a nod to the less privileged who may not be able to afford college without financial assistance.
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"We now have the technology to teach in two years what used to take four," said Michael Ellison, co-founder and CEO of CodePath, in [2]a statement . "But speed for some and not others just widens inequality. Partnering with Anthropic means our students learn to build with Claude from day one, at institutions that have historically been overlooked. This results in better outcomes for our students and a fundamentally different answer to who gets to shape the AI economy."
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We question whether access to Claude will empower economically disadvantaged students to "shape the AI economy." Entering the workforce with some knowledge of Claude should enable participation in the AI economy – certainly a win if the Claude-deprived find jobs scarce. But shaping the AI economy remains the privilege of corporations and billionaires, of those throwing cash at computing infrastructure, politicians, and public relations.
CodePath plans to integrate Claude into various programming courses to give students experience building projects with AI tools and contributing to open source projects – at least the ones that allow AI-generated code submissions.
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CodePath students have been pilot testing Claude Code, to good effect, it's claimed. Anthropic reports that Laney Hood, CodePath student and computer science major at Texas Tech University, had nice things to say about its software.
"Claude Code was instrumental in my learning process, especially since I came into the project with very little experience in the programming languages used in the repository [including TypeScript and Node.js]," said Hood.
[6]AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request
[7]Attackers finally get around to exploiting critical Microsoft bug from 2024
[8]Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy
[9]Misconfigured AI could trigger the next national infrastructure meltdown
At the start of the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, companies like Apple and Microsoft worked to get their products into the hands of students, knowing that early familiarity encourages customer retention.
As web and cloud services began to overshadow traditional operating systems as computing gatekeepers, Google adopted a similar strategy by pushing its Chromebook hardware into schools. More recently, Meta has followed suit, with a mixed and virtual reality offering called [10]Meta for Education .
And now, as AI companies strive to make their models chokepoints for computing services, they too are wooing students in the hope of building lasting brands.
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OpenAI, last year, [12]announced that it had joined the American Federation of Teachers to help launch the National Academy for AI Instruction, alongside [13]Anthropic and Microsoft . And before that, OpenAI debuted [14]ChatGPT Edu . Meta, meanwhile, has been trying to get its Llama model family into schools through a [15]partnership with Blended Labs .
Anthropic insists that its tie-up with CodePath isn't just about modernizing the curriculum of computer science. The AI biz says it expects to work with CodePath on public research into the way that AI is changing education and economic opportunities.
Those opportunities – specifically programming jobs – have [16]declined significantly since 2022 , according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Nonetheless, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics [17]says , "Overall employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 15 percent from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average [of 3 percent] for all occupations."
There is already ample research on the impact that AI is having on computer science education. [18]Recent [19]papers [20]on [21]the [22]subject [23]tend [24]to [25]be [26]a [27]mixed [28]bag , finding AI assistance can be helpful if properly administered, so long as there's compensation for the learning lost by offloading cognitive tasks. ®
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[2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-codepath-partnership
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/12/ai_bot_developer_rejected_pull_request/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/critical_microsoft_bug_from_2024/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/ai_memory_router_prices/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/gartner_ai_infrastructure/
[10] https://forwork.meta.com/meta-for-education/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aY-tDBk8N3exCOs62g_voQAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://openai.com/global-affairs/aft/
[13] https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launch-national-academy-ai-instruction-microsoft-openai-anthropic-and-united
[14] https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-edu/
[15] https://ai.meta.com/blog/blended-labs-ai-driven-schools-with-llama/
[16] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
[17] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
[18] https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2601.17024
[19] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11757
[20] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20329
[21] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02183
[22] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04309
[23] https://arxiv.org/html/2503.15684v1
[24] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10091
[25] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00108
[26] https://arxiv.org/html/2507.11543v1
[27] https://arxiv.org/html/2505.00100v1
[28] https://arxiv.org/html/2511.13271v1
[29] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
This is sad
Sad for the students who will be lulled into a false sense of achievement. Instead of wasting the students’ time on this nonsense, the college(s) should be teaching real software know-how that will actually be worth something.
What is going to happen when a “graduate” (I use the term loosely) of this nonsense starts a job and is asked to (say) look at an existing system and find out why “it fails to perform function A after half an hour of uptime. We think It’s something to do with the comms between these two systems here but we’re not sure. It could be that the interrupt handler isn’t being triggered - dunno why that would be though”? They won’t have a clue where to start
Re: This is sad
The graduate will probably do "Yo! AI they tell me this is not working in the system function A or some sht like that. Do your magic while I browse TikTok fam. Ping me a notification when you done. Safe."
So what are they going to learn?
[1]AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster
So if they're not going to actually learn programming, a degree in autocompletion is hardly going to be the key to a secure future.
[1] https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/06/ai-coding-makes-you-worse-at-learning-and-not-even-any-faster/
This is the sort of thing that would have left me incensed once upon a time. But I’ve seen too many changes and learned that this is just the nature of progress. Software engineers are becoming prompt engineers.
When I started, I started on teletypes and I learned about assembly language before progressing to C. We had to understand the architecture and be sympathetic to it. Java came along and suddenly developers didn’t have to know or care about the underlying hardware. Nor be careful in their use of memory. The world was brave and new and I didn’t like it. Isn’t this just more of the same? And I’m sure that my skills would have been considered soft by the greybeards who came before me with their punch cards and their toggle switches.
The world turns. We move with it - or we get a job doing something so menial that it isn’t worth giving to a robot.
I just wish that the AIs could be more power efficient and less memory hungry. And I’m just glad that the bulk of my career is behind me. I don’t think I’d want to be a prompt engineer.
So easy to verify!
""Claude Code was instrumental in my learning process, especially since I came into the project with very little experience in the programming languages used in the repository [including TypeScript and Node.js]," said Hood."
Aright, show us what you've learned *without* an LLM.
We all know the answer of course. Even Corporal Schultz knew the answer!
"I know nothing! NOTHING!"
Providing students taught this way are careful to put on their CV it should make filtering job applications easier.