I was confused at first, what you meant by professional-lifer

Ondsel was not a profitable product as far as I understood. Which is understandable, but I think they would have needed more time and money to make freecad a real competitor over established cad tools

A friend of mine works in a similar position and we discussed it a bit.

Since ai is a thing and we have some newer, younger and motivated profs, they actually kind of teach and discuss the use of ai in class, which is pretty important.

In my opinion we will not get rid of them, just like the internet.

And we have no metric to determined if ai was used or not.

So the only way to deal with this situation is to accept the existence and use of ai and create different tasks.

For example make them explain the code and make it clear there will be questions. That way they have to learn code. If they use ai or not does not matter.

And create tasks that require human interaction, like collaborative tasks, those can’t be done by ai and you have to structure the project.

I just treid it a bit. And I have to say its quite incredible how good it got! Still a bit rough but I would say its 30% better than a year ago. But maybe ondsel just got me into the mindset of this program.

Its sad to see ondsel go because I doubt we would be here without them.

I hope the freecad team sees all the incredible feedback and the next few versions will be similar improvements for usabilty!