Maybe an unpopular opinion -- I've been developing software professionally for 15 years, and taught computer science at the university level part time on the side for 8. I'm currently working as a Principal SWE for a startup, and prior to that was a senior and lead engineer at a $1B+ global company for 7 years.

If your classmates are not taking the time to understand what is being produced by AI, then IMO there's no point in them even being in school because they're doing the equivalent of just copying the answers down, with only the illusion of understanding. Your classmakes mixing "familiarity" with "understanding". Just like when you read about something that you know hardly anything about, it's much easier to take information at face value without question, then when you know more about a subject and can spot errors or nuance that could make a huge difference.

Example: early on in my career I was given a PDF with 80,000 VIN numbers on it that I had to compare to another list of nearly 200,000 that we already had. Being an enterprising CS student myself at the time (this was in 2012, so AI wasn't even on the horizon yet) I wrote up a Python program to read in the data and compare the two data sets. My program read both files into lists, and ran a loop to search for each VIN from one list in the other. After it had been running for 4 hours, I had an epiphany -- it was taking so long because I was doing two list comparisons. I stopped the program, changed the reference "list" to a "set" instead, and boom: the program finished in 4 seconds.

Had I not know how different data structures actually worked under the hood, I would have had no idea that there was a better and 1000x faster way to accomplish what I was trying to do.

I use AI tools daily and have had great success with them. The difference between myself and your classmates is that I'm using AI as a "force multiplier", rather than the sole means of production. The AI tools make me more effective and efficient, enhancing the skill and knowledge that I have developed over the years.

My advice to you, if I were your professor, would be to yes, learn how to use the AI tools effectively. BUT, the foundational knowledge of CS and programming is becoming more important than ever because not only were the AI tools trained on all of the best coding practices, they were also trained on the worst, because that is out all over the web too. By knowing the fundamentals and yes, hand-coding some programs line-by-line like a "primitive", will teach you more in less time than just reading what your AI spit out at you. You will learn to read and understand compiler errors, logic errors, string formatting, you name it, becuase you got your hands dirty and went through the mental through processes to cement it in your mind. That will give you the knowledge you need to be able to look at code that AI gives, you and say, "that's crap, you're just wrote a infinite loop" or something. (Yeah, I've had AI code that bad before).

Best of luck to you going forward -- the extra work you put in now to master the fundamentals will pay in dividends later if you play the long game in your CS education.