Software development is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, fueled by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs). This wave of innovation is reshaping the entire landscape and holds the promise of streamlining the development process, leading to increased productivity and efficiency. By simply providing text prompts, developers can now receive entirely generated code outputs, representing a fundamental shift in how software is built. This paradigm change can accelerate development cycles and unlock new levels of creativity and ingenuity, resulting in the realization of novel applications and business outcomes. However, this paradigm shift also brings new challenges and necessitates acquiring additional skills for software developers to fully harness the capabilities of LLM-powered tools. These skills include prompt engineering for software development, structural complexity management, debugging of AI errors, and compliance with ethical guidelines and principles.

The proposed special session will introduce our NSF-sponsored 3-year project, which aims to integrate LLMs into the standard CS curriculum. To the best of our knowledge, this project is among the first department-level initiatives to renovate CS curriculum, rather than individual courses, with the new developments of LLMs. Our project focuses on (a) enhancing students’ problem-solving and programming skills by leveraging LLMs as a learning tool in core programming courses, (b) improving students’ software development skills by integrating LLM-powered tools into the software engineering course sequence, and (c) educating students on ethical and responsible AI practices. The special session will discuss the objectives and methods of our project, as well as the current results and lessons learned.