Teaching web development when writing the code is the cheap part

A first-year student can now produce a working CRUD app in an afternoon. Assessing the artefact stopped being informative the moment that became true, because the artefact no longer evidences anything about the student.

What has not become cheap is diagnosis. Generated code fails in ordinary ways: a fetch that never handles the rejected promise, an auth check enforced in the client and nowhere else, an N+1 query that is invisible at 20 rows and fatal at 20,000. A student who cannot read the code cannot see any of it, and the model will not volunteer it. It is the same failure I measure elsewhere: confident output, no signal about whether it is right.

So the marks moved. On CMU422 and CMU529 the submission is still an application, but it arrives as a repository: commit history, a README that justifies the dependencies and the architecture, and a short written reflection on what broke, what the student changed their mind about, and what they still do not understand. A repo you cannot explain is a repo you did not build.

This is not a restriction on tool use, and policing that would fail anyway. It is a change in what counts as the work. Reading code critically was always the harder skill and we could previously get away with assuming it followed from writing enough of it. It does not follow any more, so it has to be taught directly.