Kacper me-retweet
I am almost halfway through the semester, and this term I am teaching two heavy courses (60 hours each). One is about cryptanalysis: all the way from classical cryptology of substitution ciphers, through block ciphers, up to post-quantum cryptography.
The second course is a tutorial: a "zero to hero" introduction to neural networks, starting from the classic topics of the 1940s up to the transformer revolution.
I have decided to rely heavily on agentic tools to help me write lecture notes, slides, and interactive applets. It's a very systematic process where I give lectures, do exercises with students, and fine-tune the materials. I have noticed that the boost is incredible. Now we can really dive deep into the topics, adding a lot of custom-made help and examples (full Enigma breaking or high-level implementations in JAX). I see that the students enjoy having such complete notes.
I put a lot of effort into the structure and scaffolding of those notes. Many texts are generated from good sources, but I read every single page and apply corrections. I think I have saved a lot of hours on the tedious fine-tuning of pictures and examples. I also had the courage to test and cover much more experimental content that I had never explored before.
We spend three active hours each week with the students, and the work is very intense. But at the same time, the courses feel very rewarding, and I should admit that I have learned a ton (especially about the classic papers on AI). I will definitely keep building complete lecture notes for future courses, but I already see that the main issue is proper internalization of the knowledge, both by the students and by me. Overall, the process is much smoother because we can always ask an LLM to provide a more accurate answer.
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