Why Agora exists

Here are two things I keep seeing at school. Not hypotheticals: things I've watched happen, and that I see more of every semester, at every kind of school.

The first: a student has AI do their homework and submits it. The course, meanwhile, uses AI grading, so an AI grades that homework and writes the feedback. Follow the loop all the way around. An AI did the assignment. Another AI graded it and gave feedback on it. Every box got checked, every deadline was met, the gradebook filled itself in. No human learned anything.

The second runs in the other direction: a professor asks AI to recommend articles and readings, and copy-pastes them to students. The student pastes the article into AI, asks it for a summary and some reflections, and submits that. An AI assigned the reading; another AI did the reading and reported back what it "learned." The entire pipeline of education ran, start to finish, and no human was inside it.

I've seen this from both chairs. As a student, I watch classmates reach for the tool because everyone around them already has. They are good, serious people managing impossible workloads. As a teaching assistant, I've graded work I was fairly sure no student wrote, and written careful feedback I was fairly sure no student would read. The strange part is that nobody in the loop is doing anything obviously wrong. The student is managing four other deadlines. The TA is drowning in grading. The professor is trying to keep the reading list current. Everyone made a locally reasonable choice, and the sum of those choices is a classroom where the learning quietly left the room.

I got out just in time

I sometimes think about how lucky I am that I did my undergrad before the flood. ChatGPT came out in the middle of my time in college, but for the first while almost nobody around me used it seriously. The real bloom, the moment AI became something every student uses on everything, arrived right around when I graduated in May 2025.

So in my CS labs, I typed every single line. I once lost hours to a bug that turned out to be one missing colon. I had Stack Overflow, sure, but Stack Overflow made you read five wrong answers to find your one, and that was still a different universe from a tool that writes the entire solution in seconds. Those hours felt like wasted time. They were the education.

And here's the part I have to be honest about: if I'd had today's tools back then, I don't think I would have resisted. With assignments from four other classes in the queue and the constant pressure to finish everything as fast as possible, I'm pretty sure I would have used them, most of the time. Nearly everyone I compare notes with says the same thing: we were so lucky we finished before all this.

Notice what that sentence actually means. If the people who care most about learning all agree they only learned because the temptation didn't exist yet, then this is not a willpower problem, and the answer cannot be telling students to be strong. The environment changed. The environment has to answer.

Making a place you have to actually be

That's what Agora is. It genuinely pains me to watch students lose learning opportunities they don't even know they're losing. I include myself in that.

So we build the one kind of assignment you cannot outsource: you need to show up, and explain what you know, out loud, in your own words.

An Agora session is oral. To do one, you have to have studied at least a bit beforehand. There is no way in otherwise; there's nothing to paste. Then you talk. You explain what you learned in class the way you understand it, and Agora listens and probes: what's missing, what's incorrect, where the understanding is thinner than you thought. At the end you get detailed feedback on exactly that: not on a document an AI wrote for you, but on the words that came out of your own mouth. The human is back in the loop of learning, because this loop is made of the human. Take the student out and there is no session.

Most AI tools compete on how fast they can hand you a correct answer. Agora shifts the role of AI from giving you a correct answer instantly to asking you a clever question that makes you think. Not learning made faster by skipping the struggle, but learning made worth showing up for.

I keep building it because the problem refuses to stay theoretical. I watch it every week, in the classes I take and the ones I help teach.

I can't give today's students my missing colon back. That particular flavor of struggle is probably gone for good, and I won't pretend the old friction was sacred. But the point was never the colon. The point was that I had to be there. Nobody could sit in that chair for me. Agora is my attempt to make sure students still have somewhere they have to be.