Using AI to inform architecture doesn’t seem so different from googling architecture in this case. Architectural patterns are mostly well understood and well documented these days and are something that you could piece together via Google search pre AI. The thing that AI brings to the table that wasn’t google able in the past is code generation. Previously you had to understand the architecture patterns to implement them yourself, but now the AI can just do it for you.

> Would you have accepted them cooy-pasting code from libraries together to build their project?

Yes, if they are "responsible" for the code delivered, where responsible means they understand the code, the architecture, the decisions made, etc.

In this case, the students had to invent multiple strategies to solve a specific problem. The "successful" groups did a mix of generated and hand-crafted code (don't know percentages), implemented different strategies and knew their plus and minuses, could change the code in a timely manner to accommodate some of my requests, etc. The "unsuccessful" group couldn't do any of that.

I'm not anti-AI (and really, what could I do if I were?) since I use it myself, I'm just anti-slop, especially from my students.

But in reality I've been slowly transitioning from group projects (for a subset of the grade) to "practical tests", where they must implement a significant subset of a larger project in a 2h class. Still experimenting though.

He explains why in his comment. Read it again, carefully. Or ask an LLM for an "explainer"..