PS DEV

Session Description

We’ve both been mentoring open source contributors through Outreachy for a few years. Tilda coordinates mentors globally, and we’ve both been mentors and interns. We thought we had this figured out. Then AI showed up and broke everything.

Contributors started submitting perfect code they couldn’t explain. PRs looked great, but ask someone to modify their own work and they’d freeze up. We realized people were using ChatGPT, and none of us—including the contributors themselves—could tell anymore what they’d actually learned versus what they’d generated.
We had to completely rethink how we mentor.

What we tried that didn’t work:

• Asking “Did you use AI?” got us nowhere. People felt defensive or genuinely didn’t know if they’d learned something.
• Treating AI code like copy-pasted Stack Overflow didn’t work either; the volume and polish were totally different.
• Trying to detect AI-generated code was pointless. We don’t care if they used AI. We care if they learned.

What actually worked:

• We changed our code review questions from “Does this work?” to “Why this approach?” and “What happens if we change this?” The answers told us everything.
• We restructured tasks: less “implement this feature” and more “solve this problem, explain your thinking, then build it.”
• We did more live pairing. It’s hard to hide what you don’t understand in real time.
• We taught people to use AI for learning (asking it to explain concepts) instead of just generating solutions.

This isn’t solved—we’re still figuring stuff out. But we’ve tried a lot and can tell you what worked and what didn’t. But we know for sure that you’ll leave with concrete techniques you can use immediately if you’re mentoring contributors, teaching programming, or helping anyone learn when AI’s in the picture.