Learning Goals and the Goals of Learning: Teaching in the Age of AI with Aaron Bauer

Aaron Bauer is a software engineer and one of Jane Street's few developer educators—a role that splits his time between writing code and teaching other people how to write it. Before joining the firm, he taught computer science at Carleton College, including four straight terms online during the pandemic. In this episode, Ron and Aaron discuss what it takes to teach engineering inside a company with its own language, its own version control, and its own editors, and what changes when an LLM can do the exercise for you. Along the way, they consider the underrated power of a live lecture; why the text editor is still the software engineer's home base; using editor telemetry to find out how AI is actually changing developer workflows; and how Jane Street rebuilt its intern curriculum around testing, design, and code review now that producing the code is the easy part.You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:Foldit and AlphaFoldCarleton College Computer ScienceFlipped classroom, active learning, mastery learning, and cognitive load"The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard" — Mueller & Oppenheimer on handwritten vs. typed notesMerlin and ocaml-lspecaml — writing Emacs extensions in OCamlBonsai — Jane Street's OCaml web UI libraryOxCamlClaude Code output styles — the "learning" mode Aaron describes (note: Anthropic has since moved this to a plugin)Jane Street's tech internship