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I think you're right to feel a bit cheated. They're supposed to be teaching you computer science, not "prompt engineering."
My conclusion has been to pursue the blue ocean strategy — don't go where everyone else is going. Find the calm blue ocean where no one else is and stake your claim there. If you're just one of billions of prompt engineers, you don't have any in-demand skills. If you actually learn real computer science, you'll have an increasingly rare skill and will be there when the LLMs fail to work and will know how to fix it (if it can be fixed).
i think this is flawed, tbh. it's true that up until this year, llms did not make people any faster at coding, or more able to tackle challenges outside their skillset. but that has changed, and if you're in uni now, you're not trying to be useful today, you're trying to be useful 4-5 years from now. it's wildly irresponsible imo to gamble your future on llms failing when the trend has been the exact opposite.
you also shouldn't gamble your future on llms being easily available forever. but you don't have to do either.
the real thing that matters isn't line-by-line coding ability, it's a deep understanding of technology. that's what you should be focusing on. it cuts juniors deep (and by definition, most coders at uni are juniors) because they tend to be the group that focuses the most on the superficial aspects of coding and not on the underlying reasons and technologies, but that focus was always wrong, it just used to be easier to get away with being wrong.
focus on being someone who understands systems and builds things, whether or not you have an ai to help you. programming is not an abstract field judged arbitrarily by how well your peers like you, at the end of the day it's very results-driven. we build real things, and it matters more what you can build than how you do it. and what you can build directly depends on your understanding of technology, regardless of how much ai is being used at building it. it does not matter if your c++ is 10% more idiomatic or 20% less llm-coded than that of your peers, what matters is if you managed to solve the problem.
even if we assume llms will be more capable in the future, not less, that direction will help you, because most non-coders don't know what the hell to ask an llm to get something done. they also didn't know where to start before llms were a thing. it's your willingness to learn and your understanding of where to go, what to reach for, that sets you apart from an mba with a claude subscription, not your ability to dance around the borrow checker.
In the last 24 hours a vibe coded game launcher has leaked personal information and Outlook is down worldwide (likely due to some LLM-generated flaw).
When was the last time Outlook was down for a day? What are they going to do to fix it after offshoring their brain to Copilot? “Please, Copilot, unfuck Outlook! 😢”
Every day we hear about an LLM that deleted data for no apparent reason.
If this is the future, then the future is Idiocracy.
And the point of university isn’t to prepare prompt engineers. It’s to prepare students to make contributions to the advancement of arts and sciences.
LLMs take the argument of “I have a calculator why do I need to learn math?” to the extreme where we’re now burning math textbooks and blindly obeying the calculator when it says to eat one rock a day.