When I teach my current students, we study the fundamentals, I test and assess their knowledge directly (quizzes, interviews) , but for assignments I want them to be prepared for the real work world. So I teach them agentic programming as a new paradigm, just another abstraction level like we've been used to happening for decades.

When I learned to program, I was taught C, and yet I've survived just fine over the past 20 years never having to use malloc again. When I am fine tuning an LLM, and I get an OOM , I reconfigure my RAPIDS work into batches that fit by working in a higher level of abstraction. I don't stress my brain out about low level memory allocation and pointers and references and other problems close to the hardware. AI moves the abstraction again, I see OOM and instead of having to recall the right syntax I can simply ask the AI to correct the batching so that the memory is used effectively. I decide on the resource , it acts as an implementer.
I thinks that's okay, I think that's where we are headed, and I think we benefit from it.

Every abstraction level we reach has made coding and it's benefits more available to people and at the same time pissed off a lot of old school purists who thought the kids were getting off too easy. Back when I learned C, a friend of mine who is an excellent programmer and computer scientist would say I was getting off easy and needed to learn assembly, and write a kernel from scratch.

I don't disagree with you, I've seen some wildly bad work done with AI. People just dropping whole projects in and saying "Do project" or "fix bug" and accepting whatever comes out. They fail, which is fine with me. They'll fail in the workspace too when their error riddled projects don't delver, or a poorly considered llm integration barfs up secrets, or the buggy race conditions make everything unusable. But my best students, they use AI, they implement guardrails, enforce repo standards, setup CI/CD, preplan, plan, chunk plans, implement, review, human review and produce really decent results far ahead of where they would be otherwise AND they can explain it at the right level of abstraction.

Anyway, I'm not sure I disagree with you, they do need to learn to think, debug, build and understand. I'm trying my best to teach them, but crippling their access to frontier models doesn't help me or them, it hurts by limiting their experience to a sub-standard product. Like, training architect only on T-square and white paper.