Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, a wave of new products, including DeepSeek, Gemini, Cursor, and more, have spilled onto students’ computers. Veritas spoke with three Palo Alto High School students to hear how these tools fit into their routines.
For senior Peyton Wenher, AI has become an essential part of his learning, but he emphasizes its role as a starting point rather than a complete solution.
“I’m pretty lazy when it comes to reading, so I feel like it helps with summaries,” Wenher said. “It can get you all the key points while you are still learning.”
While he acknowledges his frequent use of AI, he feels like it shouldn’t replace the actual work.
“If you constantly rely on AI, you’re not going to make good work in the future,” Wenher said.
For example, Peyton says, the only way you can improve your reading comprehension is to do the work and read. Peyton also loves using AI for quick advice on stuff, like a therapist.
“If I’m just confused or need advice on some personal crisis, I just ask AI, and they can help me out,” Wenher said.
Junior Atlas Gerritsen finds AI super helpful as a tutor.
“It helps clarify questions I might have if I don’t want to email a teacher at 10 p.m.,” Gerritsen said. “It’s nice to be able to go to Chat GPT or Gemini and get a nice, simple, explained answer.”
Gerritsen says he approaches AI cautiously because of incorrect responses from past questions, but he feels like it has improved in recent months.
“It used to give a lot of incorrect facts, so I still have the habit of fact-checking whatever it says on Google,” Gerritsen said.
When using AI, Gerritsen says it is important to ask highly specific questions, a technique known as prompt engineering, if you want a clear answer.
“I’ve found just to ask really specific questions,” Gerritsen said. “It’s prompt engineering where you have to ask it exactly what you want to get answered. Otherwise, it’ll go off on a tangent.”
Senior Wilson Earnst finds AI is great for challenges that stump a Google search. Earlier this spring, he was canvassing neighborhoods with dozens of flyers and needed an app that would mark each house he had already visited.
“I use it for a bunch of different things,” he said. “Recently, I was handing out a bunch of flyers, and I wanted to find an app that can track my location so I know where I’ve handed out the flyers already, and it found the exact thing I was looking for, even if I wasn’t able to express what I wanted in a Google search.”
Wilson is also a part of a local robotics team, as part of that, he serves as one of the lead programmers. Because of this, he has discovered how useful AI could be for helping him with coding.
“I was writing a position tracking script that should have been easy, but was taking forever,” Earnst said. “ChatGPT created the program in seconds and trimmed a half‑hour of busywork.”
Still, Earnst said AI hasn’t replaced the fundamentals; you still need to understand the code with or without AI.
“It’s not at the point where you can tell it to code an entire project and walk away, you have to know enough to refine what it gives you.”