Date
Publisher
arXiv
Generative artificial intelligence has moved from a disruptive novelty to a recurring part of software-development and computing-education workflows, while software agents are beginning to act across repositories, command lines, browsers, tests, and other tools. The educational problem is no longer whether students should be allowed to generate code, but whether software-engineering (SE) programs can preserve and assess human understanding while preparing students to work responsibly with increasingly capable AI systems. This paper presents a structured integrative review of research and practice from 2023 through 23 September 2026, supplemented by established work on AI literacy, technical debt, and human-AI collaboration. The evidence supports a conditional conclusion: GenAI can improve access to explanations, feedback, practice, and short-term task completion, but learning outcomes depend on prior knowledge, scaffolding, verification, task design, and assessment. We examine student help-seeking and authorship, faculty assessment and policy demands, and the wider SE risks created when generated artifacts persist across repositories, teams, architectures, and deployed systems. We extend the concept of comprehension debt: the deferred learning and maintenance cost that arises when AI-assisted production outpaces a learner's or team's ability to explain, test, modify, and justify the resulting software. We then refine the AI-Augmented Software Engineering Education (AASEE) framework into five non-linear integration levels and four cross-cutting evidence obligations: explain, verify, modify, and account. The framework links delegation to evidence, governance, and recovery mechanisms appropriate to its consequences.
Study at a glance
- Question: How can software engineering education preserve human understanding and assess learning alongside generative and agentic AI?
- Setting and data: Published research and preprints on computing and software engineering education, January 2023 through September 23, 2026.
- Method: Structured integrative literature review.
Why it matters
A plausible software artifact no longer reliably reveals a student's reasoning. Software engineering education must preserve human understanding and judgment while preparing students to supervise increasingly autonomous tools.
Key findings
- Generative AI can improve access to explanations and practice, but effects on assessed learning are highly uneven and depend on scaffolding, prior knowledge, and task design.
- A meta-analysis revealed extreme variation in cognitive outcomes, with overall effects becoming indistinguishable from zero once adjusted for publication bias.
- Fast artifact generation can outpace student understanding, creating comprehension debt where learners cannot explain, test, modify, or justify code they produced using AI.
Summary drafted with AI from the full paper and may contain errors. See the full paper for details.
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