Generative AI Solves Introductory Computer Science Tasks. Now What?

This chapter presents a case as to why introductory computer science (CS) courses need to change in light of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). It outlines programming skills that will be foundational for new students to master when working with GenAI. There are a number of foundational skills that are crucial when programming with a GenAI assistant. These include problem decomposition, prompting and working with GenAI, and testing and debugging. The chapter describes each of these necessary skills and why they have gained importance when working with GenAI. There are many ways to incorporate these skills into a CS1 course. For concreteness, the chapter also presents how students chose to integrate them into their CS1-large language models course. Students need to practice generating decompositions whose functions have the right level of granularity: functions that are too big are error-prone, and functions that are too small clutter up the code.