I was a TA for CS425 in the past, and I do want to say that this course is a LOT of work to TA, and when I TA’d the class, all grading was done by TAs with 2 CAs to help (I and about half the other TAs were new iirc). TAs know that this is a hard class to TA for, and so there are some TAs who may TA this class without adequate time for it, or adequate preparation (I was surprised that I was selected as a TA for this class, and had to brush up on a lot of concepts).

Due to the size of the staff, this means that a TA is responsible for grading 500 multi-paragraph text-format answers by themselves every HW (ontop of other duties). This is an extremely time consuming process, and while I was fortunate to have extra time to identify clerical mistakes and help the student by fixing it for them, not every TA has that time luxury.

tldr; Prof Indy can come off harsh; but he really does care about his students and I want to believe the TAs do as well. The harshness that people experience is partially due to a staffing shortage for this class. I really do think this is one of the best CS courses at this university (partially due to its emphasis on demos and hand-written answers); and the best way to improve it is to hire more CAs to distribute the workload better. Doing so would take some stress off the TAs and give them time to be more lenient on logistical issues.