# Disabling AI help while teaching with Pluto

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Tags:** outreach, teaching, pluto, plutoui\
**Created:** [February 6, 2026, 8:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516 "2026-02-06T20:35:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Offray](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/offray/32/220982_2.png) [@Offray](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Offray)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2026, 8:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516/1 "2026-02-06T20:35:57Z")

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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](https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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:

- an introduction to computational thinking, with more classic sources, including snippets from “How to design programs”, “Think Julia”, several tutorials, and some simple data scrapping and chatbot projects, if time allows.
- a critical approach to AI (or what I like to call “Apparent Intelligence”), and a way to “de-hype” it, including the [Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia](https://openletter.earth/open-letter-stop-the-uncritical-adoption-of-ai-technologies-in-academia-b65bba1e), [data colonialism collectives](https://www.tierracomun.net/en/home) with [introductory texts](https://blog.scielo.org/en/2025/11/07/data-colonialism-in-science-a-new-form-of-epistemic-domination/) and related videos like “Is AI making us dumber? Maybe”:

[![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/d/0/d01f44bdc0b535bbcdfa2ce63557cd92548c88e1.jpeg "Is AI making us dumber? Maybe. | Charlie Gedeon | TEDxSherbrooke Street West") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8WomdCLBqE)

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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**Author:** ![Mason](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mason/32/2423_2.png) [@Mason](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Mason)\
**Post date:** [February 8, 2026, 2:22pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516/2 "2026-02-08T14:22:12Z")

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According to [the pluto docs](https://plutojl.org/en/docs/ai-editor-features/#blocking-ai-features-in-your-course), 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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**Author:** ![Offray](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/offray/32/220982_2.png) [@Offray](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Offray)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2026, 12:48pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516/3 "2026-02-09T12:48:34Z")

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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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**Author:** ![Mason](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mason/32/2423_2.png) [@Mason](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Mason)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2026, 3:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516/4 "2026-02-09T15:40:49Z")

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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](https://github.com/JuliaPluto/Pluto.jl/issues/3209) 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](https://github.com/JuliaPluto/Pluto.jl/blob/main/src/Configuration.jl) 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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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Offray](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/offray/32/220982_2.png) [@Offray](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Offray)\
**Post date:** [February 27, 2026, 12:06am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/disabling-ai-help-while-teaching-with-pluto/135516/5 "2026-02-27T00:06:29Z")

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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](https://github.com/JuliaPluto/Pluto.jl) and start my participation in the [respective GitHub issue](https://github.com/JuliaPluto/Pluto.jl/discussions/3233#discussioncomment-15940389). 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.