Prof. Hayes is launching CSCI 1041: Designing, Building, and Thinking with AI, which will be offered officially for the first time in Spring 2027 at CU Boulder. The course was piloted in Fall 2026 as CSCI 2830 "Build with AI."

This is not a course about learning to use a chatbot. Students gain advanced AI literacy by designing and building with AI. Over fourteen weeks, they go from writing their first structured prompt to shipping a working AI-enabled application of their own design. Along the way they build a personal web page, an interactive browser game, a live-data dashboard, a document-grounded question-answering assistant, a task-executing agent with human approval gates, a multi-agent workflow, and a voice/mobile interface. They also break these systems on purpose to learn how they fail.

The organizing idea of the course is "AI use is required. Unreviewed AI output is prohibited." Generating things is now nearly free, and evaluating them is the scarce skill. Every assignment asks students to build something and to show, with a written trail anyone could follow, that they checked it. The course also covers how modern AI systems work and fail, guardrails such as risk-gating actions behind human approval, and the ethical and social consequences of the systems students build.

The course is designed for everyone: by design, more than half of the students are expected to be non-CS majors. There are no prerequisites, and no programming, terminal, or web experience is assumed. Students need a laptop and a willingness to check things carefully. The course provides model access, so students never need to buy API credits.

Learn more at buildwithai.colorado.edu.