As AI-powered "vibe coding" grows in popularity and demonstrates real productivity gains across industries, the motivation to teach and learn programming in universities is rapidly eroding. With most students turning to AI tools rather than writing software from scratch, traditional programming assignments are losing their meaning. So, where does that leave us: should coding still be taught at all?
In this talk, I will share the current state of programming education at KAIST, including our curricula and the challenges we face in keeping students engaged and motivated in the AI era. I will then discuss how foundational programming education can be reimagined — not by abandoning coding, but by centering it on the core software engineering principles that enable students to use AI tools effectively, and to produce software that is reliable, purposeful, and fit for solving real problems.
Director of the Research Center for Big Data Edge Cloud Services (BECS)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
In-Young Ko is a Professor in the School of Computing and the Director of the Research Center for Big Data Edge Cloud Services (BECS) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003. His research interests include software engineering, services computing, and web engineering. His recent work focuses on service-oriented software development within large-scale, distributed environments, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems, and edge-cloud environments.
