Disabling AI help while teaching with Pluto

New to Julia
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Hi all,

After having it in my radar for some years, I’ll be starting to teach in Julia in the Information Sciences department of the Javeriana University, in Bogota, Colombia. I have been a long Pharo user, enthusiast and promoter and even I made my own computational notebook based on it, called Grafoscopio. This semester I want to see if Julia fits more fluently the approach I have been experimenting previously with other technologies and will be a good way for me and my students to experience an interesting technology ecosystem and the communities around it.

Our approach is closer to Science and Technology Studies (STS) than the more empiric analytical epistemologies (mathematics, natural sciences and engineering) where Julia has been used. However I think than Julia can shine not only in STEM disciplines but also in the STS transdisciplines, despite not finding much priors on those fields.

Because of our context and where we teach/learn, we will try a mixed and eclectic approach that includes:

Because of everything I have talked before and because we are trying to dis-encourage the “AI first” approach in favor of a “think by yourself and with your peers first” approach, I would like to know if is it possible to disable the “Fix Syntax with AI” suggestion from the Pluto UI and make it a default when installing it from the package manager? This will help us to avoid unnecessary student temptations and to showcase that, in some places, is still possible to escape the “AI down your throat” of big corps and (Global North) markets.

Thanks in advance, not only for the answer, but for the wider Julia ecosystem and the communities around it.

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The Thing I Loved Has Changed (on programming and AI)
From STEM to STS
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According to the pluto docs, it looks like you can disable the AI features using a launch kwarg enable_ai_editor_features=false. However, i dont see a way to make it installation wide.

I think the proper solution here would be for Pluto to use Preferences.jl to let users globally override these kwarg default values. There’s something other default launch parameters for Pluto that people would probably also be interested in setting globally too.

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Thanks a lot @Mason. This is a working solution while we find a better way to do it.

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It looks like there actually was discussion about this on Github already: Option to change AI feature default to disabled · Issue #3209 · JuliaPluto/Pluto.jl · GitHub where several people suggested multiple times that this sort of thing be configurable using Preferences.jl, but that particular suggestion was never really responded to.

So I’m not sure if the devs just don’t like the idea of Preferences.jl, didn’t understand the suggestion, or just didn’t want to be the ones to implement it.

I’d suggest that if you’re interested in trying out a PR for this, it looks like it’d be somewhat simple. I think you’d just need to go through the file Pluto.jl/src/Configuration.jl at main · JuliaPluto/Pluto.jl · GitHub and search for any of the toplevel const options that you think should be a preference, and replace it with a @load_preference.

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I’m just adding some details to this topic to let you know that I created my fork of the Pluto repository with AI disabled and start my participation in the respective GitHub issue. So far the fork seems working well and I’ll be able to use it with my undergrad students until the PR is accepted and the defaults regarding AI for Pluto as an educational tool have been discussed.

Thanks again.