Schedule

TBD

Week 1

Thursday, September 3

First day of class.

Week 2

Tuesday, September 8

Reading: Peter Naur (1985), Programming as Theory Building (PDF)

Thursday, September 10

Reading: look at the Compiling to Neurons papers of Joey Velez-Ginorio, who will join as a guest. In particular, see the POPL’26 and PLDI’26 papers with Nada Amin, Konrad Kording, and Steve Zdancewic.

Week 3

Tuesday, September 15

Reading: Sverrir Thorgeirsson, Theo B. Weidmann, Zhendong Su (CHI’26), Computer Science Achievement and Writing Skills Predict Vibe Coding Proficiency (PDF)

Secondary reading: Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Michael Littman (CACM’26 to appear), Teaching Novice Computing and Programming in the Agentic AI Era, (link)

Thursday, September 17

Reading: Alex Gu, Naman Jain, Wen-Ding Li, Manish Shetty, Yijia Shao, Ziyang Li, Diyi Yang, Kevin Ellis, Koushik Sen, Armando Solar-Lezama (ICML 2025), Challenges and Paths Towards AI for Software Engineering (PDF)

Alex Gu will join as a guest.

Week 4

Tuesday, September 22

Reading: Gan Shen, Shun Kashiwa, Lindsey Kuper (ICFP 2024). HasChor: Functional Choreographic Programming for All (Functional Pearl) (doi)

PhD student Cameron Wong will talk about his experience implementing choreographic libraries in Lean.

Thursday, September 24

Reading: Simon Henniger, Stephen Chong, Nada Amin (2026). Djinnlang: Higher-Level Programming by Unambiguous Specification with an LLM in the Compiler (link)

Week 5

Tuesday, September 29

Class on formal verification.

Refresher: CS1520: Axiomatic Semantics and Hoare Logic (Lecture 19) and Curry-Howard correspondence (Lecture 15).

Reading 1 (for auto-active verifiers like Dafny): C. A. R. Hoare (CACM 1969). An axiomatic basis for computer programming (doi).

Reading 2 (for proof assistants like Lean or Rocq): Philip Wadler (CACM 2015). Propositions as Types (doi)

Thursday, October 1

Reading: Bowers et al. (POPL 2023). Top-Down Synthesis for Library Learning (doi)

Maddy Bowers will be presenting and discussing her work related to library learning.

Week 6

Tuesday, October 6 (Assignment 1 Due)

Discussion of assignment.

Thursday, October 8

Discussion of assignment.

Week 7

Tuesday, October 13

TBD

Thursday, October 15

TBD

Week 8

Tuesday, October 20

Reading: Celeste Barnaby, Danny Ding, Osbert Bastani, Isil Dillig (PLDI 2026). Choose, Don’t Label: Multiple-Choice Query Synthesis for Program Disambiguation (PDF).

Celeste will join us as a guest for the session.

Thursday, October 22

TBD

Week 9

Tuesday, October 27 (Project Proposals Due)

TBD

Thursday, October 29

TBD

Week 10

Tuesday, November 3

TBD

Thursday, November 5

TBD

Week 11

Tuesday, November 10

TBD

Thursday, November 12

TBD

Week 12

Student Presentations of their Ongoing Projects

Tuesday, November 17

TBD

Thursday, November 19

TBD

Week 13

Tuesday, November 24

TBD

Thursday, November 26

Thanksgiving.

Week 14

Tuesday, December 1

Last day of class.