Yes, You Can Master Software Engineering. Our AI Will Help.

Coding is intimidating. And when you’re coming from a field totally unrelated to tech, it can be nerve-wracking to make the leap into a new industry. What if you don’t make it? What if you can’t grasp all the technical topics you need to learn to land a new career?

This is exactly what brought a team led by Alisa Nesterenko along with Andrei Parfenov and Sergey Parfenov to an innovation: AI hints. 

Now, students are going to have an AI helper custom-made for their bootcamp needs at their fingertips, and it’s going to help them stay the course as they supercharge their development. Here’s how.

AI hints: the basics

Importantly, the AI had to give hints, not answers. “We don’t want to give students the right solution. We want to help them actually move towards the correct solution, the author’s solution as we call it,” said Alisa, learning experience designer and product manager. After all, in most cases, just giving them the answer wouldn’t help them master the material.

The solution? One button. If students are stuck, they just click it and get a hint that can either get them started or nudge them towards fixing errors in their code. This one-button approach also keeps them focused. “We wanted students to ask for and get help when they need it, but at the same time, we didn’t want them to get sidetracked into asking about something else, something unrelated,” said Alisa.

Why it matters for TripleTen students

“Previously, we only had hints written by the team,” said Andrei, curriculum lead of the Software Engineering_{What’s Inside: TripleTen Software Engineering Program} program. “With static hints, we expected students to follow one scenario, but this one explanation wasn’t right for everyone.”

With AI hints, students can reach out to the AI assistant any time they want and get different explanations. Andrei, curriculum lead of the Software Engineering program

“When the team writes the hints that students see, they assume the issue that students have in that particular task. The hard-coded hint usually addresses the main point of the task, the most complicated part of it, or the new thing. However, that doesn’t cover a scenario where students maybe misunderstood something from earlier content and made a mistake there,” added Alisa.

There’s no way for a human to predict every single issue a student might have and then write out custom suggestions. However, with this AI coding tool, precise assistance is immediately available. This makes intuitive help available anytime.

And for these smaller queries, the AI hints radically speed up the studying process. See, for more minor questions, asking for assistance from tutors used to be inefficient. “Students would go to Discord, ask the tutor, wait for help only to get the answer that there’s a tiny mistake. That’s a waste of everyone’s time — both the tutors’ and the students’,” said Alisa.

Still, TripleTen tutors_{Will I Get Practical Guidance and Feedback From Tutors at TripleTen?} remain absolutely vital. Alisa is eminently clear about that. “From the very beginning, we thought about the fact that we do not want to replace the tutor. There’s no way to replace tutors,” she said.

Rather, this is a way of enriching the meetings students have with their tutors. “We want to give students more time for meaningful conversations with their tutors. We don’t want them to spend all their time investigating typos or silly mistakes that everyone can make. Instead, they can have more time to talk about their projects,” said Andrei.

It’s a simple equation. More high-quality time with the tutors means students can more effectively close gaps in their knowledge. By removing the smaller blockers, students are given more space to tackle the bigger questions_{Will I be able to master complex technical information on the TripleTen platform?} they really want to focus on.

Why it matters for TripleTen grads

Working with AI won’t just improve the learning process.

The ability to use AI coding tools will be a vital skill when grads land programming jobs.

Already, AI tools for coding such as GitHub Copilot, an assistant focused on helping programmers in their day-to-day work, are becoming more and more indispensable.

“This will help students in the future. If they already know how to work with AI tools, how to analyze this information, how to trust it or not trust it, in the future, when they work in a real code editor and they have AI tools, they will be more confident,” said Andrei. “It will be a new skill for students — to work with the information generated by AI.” 

Our pitch to you

If you want to ensure your growth as you learn coding, then check out our newly AI-hint-augmented Software Engineering bootcamp. And if you want to learn more about tech and launching a great career, listen to our podcast linked below.