In my University, we heavily lean on Java as our primary language of choice. During the very first programming course (Basics of Programming in Java, 60 hours) for quite some time we have been starting with simple text editor + Terminal and, after a few hours, we've been migrating to IntelliJ IDEA.

This was a decent middle ground between showing them the most straightforward (because simple doesn't really fit well here in my opinion) way of running things (JDK was already installed on the machines they were using) and "the way business does things."

However, I feel like we are facing quite a problem here - IntelliJ (alongside some other JetBrains' IDEs) has integrated AI assistant, that is switched on by default. Disabling it for every installation is not suitable for us. What's more, students who download the IDE to mimic the University's setup will also have it on by default.

The main problem I see with it is that people will more blindly follow AI suggestions instead of thinking about the core of the problem. This will likely hinder their ability to reason about problems and fixing them when AI inevitably fails to do their job for them.

There is another side of the coin though - maybe it is just the new way and we, as educators, should embrace it. Maybe the correct way to handle this "problem" was not to treat it as a problem at all. Maybe we should not only encourage, but even mandate that students use code assistants that will be widely available for them so that they can quickly glance over a broader range of problems and solutions in order to help them spot the patterns of correct and incorrect code better.

AI, being the hot topic for quite some time now, has proven to be challenging phenomenon. Has anyone here successfully incorporated AI into their introductory courses and found some point of views that help out in these kind of situations?

In my University, we heavily lean on Java as our primary language of choice. During the very first programming course (Basics of Programming in Java, 60 hours) for quite some time we have been starting with simple text editor + Terminal and, after a few hours, we've been migrating to IntelliJ IDEA.

This was a decent middle ground between showing them the most straightforward (because simple doesn't really fit well here in my opinion) way of running things (JDK was already installed on the machines they were using) and "the way business does things."

However, I feel like we are facing quite a problem here - IntelliJ (alongside some other JetBrains' IDEs) has integrated AI assistant Full Line Code Completion, that is switched on by default. Disabling it for every installation is not suitable for us. What's more, students who download the IDE to mimic the University's setup will also have it on by default.

The main problem I see with it is that people will more blindly follow AI suggestions instead of thinking about the core of the problem. This will likely hinder their ability to reason about problems and fixing them when AI inevitably fails to do their job for them.

There is another side of the coin though - maybe it is just the new way and we, as educators, should embrace it. Maybe the correct way to handle this "problem" was not to treat it as a problem at all. Maybe we should not only encourage, but even mandate that students use code assistants that will be widely available for them so that they can quickly glance over a broader range of problems and solutions in order to help them spot the patterns of correct and incorrect code better.

AI, being the hot topic for quite some time now, has proven to be challenging phenomenon. Has anyone here successfully incorporated AI into their introductory courses and found some point of views that help out in these kind of situations?