Should Cursor be taught in college?

“I was at a college campus… last semester, and I asked the students in the CS program, ‘What do they ask you about agentic coding? What do they teach you about AI code completion?’ Nothing, nothing, nothing. Not even a one day class on it.”

— Andrew Mayne (former Science Communicator at OpenAI), speaking with Lee Robinson (VP of DX at Cursor) on the OpenAI Podcast

I don’t think it makes sense to teach agentic coding in college.

I graduated from college this past May. Our curriculum was taught entirely in C++ and C.

Not because they expect us to really ever use it! But because Computer Science is a field that is, at least for now, moving quickly enough that the specific details of anything they teach you in college will soon become outdated.

They don’t even teach React in college. And I don’t particularly think they should!

What they teach is fundamental academic Computer Science, not the zoomed-in practical things in particular, but the things that have a chance at being useful for your entire career. React, dominant and wonderful as it is, may very well not be dominant for my entire career.

Learning C++ and C was not an end, but a means to an end. And the real outcome — fundamental understanding of Computer Science concepts — will hopefully be relevant long-term despite radical change in the industry.

And what certainly won’t be relevant for decades is “how to best use Cursor today (gpt-5-codex and sonnet-4.5 edition)”.

The way that I use AI for coding today is hugely different from the way I used it last summer. Or even at the beginning of this summer. Any attempt to teach Cursor in college would boil down to a bag of prompting techniques and mental models for today’s models, but not necessarily for tomorrow’s.

The landscape is changing too fast to be encapsulated in a college course that’s supposed to last a student for a long time. ChatGPT didn’t exist when I started college four years ago; Cursor only appeared in the latter half of my time in college.

A course on agentic coding would probably be popular, yes, but short-sighted.

(I don’t really know what a “one day class” is — it sounds like something that a university couldn’t represent within the on-prem Oracle software that powered our course schedules — but a club meeting for those interested in agentic coding seems perfectly fine. But be wary of making it boring.)