this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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I’m about halfway through my degree and haven’t used AI for any of it 🤷♂️ Including at least two 10 page papers and I don’t even know how many 3-5 page ones, lol. I have no intention of changing that either, why would I want to dilute my writing voice or my line of reasoning throughout the paper? Writing is thinking, there are so many things you think you understand well until you sit down and try to explain it. That’s the point, that’s the process of learning.
If it was up to me I would accept a student doing a presentation instead of a final paper if they really struggled with writing, because I’ve seen professors do that and I think it teaches just as much (also it’s fun to watch people give presentations they’re enthusiastic about). But it has to be equivalent to the amount of writing you’d be doing, like 20 minutes to present 3-4 pages. But either way, AI isn’t going to teach you anything for either of those compared to doing the work yourself.
I'm in a field that decidedly does not value the written word beyond the minimum they need to understand and write emails, but I had to take a couple of writing classes in college.
I had to write several 10+ page papers, including research papers (like actual research, not "do your own research" research) before LLMs existed and I'm so fucking thankful for it. Nearly every single day I have to read the shit my colleagues write, and it's like they've never read a book in their entire lives. It's honestly tragic.
And this is a field full of ostensibly intelligent people.
Some would say the fact that your colleagues clearly didn't need to take those classes means you shouldn't have either.
I would not say that, I love writing.
Oh man, I asked Claude to summarize my commits and changes today, using the voice and structure of my usual daily updates.
It was fucking awful.
Claude spent 5 minutes on this then I had to review and edit anyway. I ended up spending 10 minutes writing down the what+why in a bullet list from scratch and it’s 100x clearer and better.
The AI neither did a better job nor saved me time.
I think you’re doing the right thing.
I suspect in five years or so final exams will be a 1 on 1, face to face meeting with the teacher where they ask you some softball questions you should be able to answer easily if you did even some of the homework.
I love this take. One suggestion I would make is also rake your knowledge and try to help someone earlier in their journey. Writing is great but you get no feedback immediately(you may get some later).
When you explain something which you only have a surface knowledge of and the other person asks why... That's teaches both of you alot.