Every term a student asks me some version of the same question. Can I use AI for this assignment? My answer is the same. Yes, and I want to know how you used it.

The policy

My course policy is short:

  • Disclose your AI use in full.
  • Cite it properly, in a footnote, endnote, or code comment.
  • The work still has to reflect your own thinking.

Skip any of those, and it counts as academic misconduct.

What good use looks like

That is the floor. What I spend more time on with students is what good AI use actually looks like. Two ideas:

Empower your skills. Let AI handle the repetitive work. Boilerplate, debugging, the third pass over a paragraph. Treat it as a multiplier for what you can already do.

Stay in the driving seat. AI is the engine. You are the driver. You set the direction, check the route, and own the final work. If you cannot defend a line in your submission, it should not be there.

Why it matters now

The shift outside the classroom is moving fast. Gartner's Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026 lists AI-native development platforms as a near-term trend, and projects 40 percent of enterprise application portfolios will include custom apps built on them by 2030, up from 2 percent in 2025.

So the graduates entering the workforce will not be competing with people who refuse to use AI. They will be working alongside agents that build code next to them. The skill that matters is judgment, and judgment is built by doing the thinking yourself.

The future is not AI versus learning. It is AI within learning.