Feasibility Study of Augmenting Teaching Assistants with AI for CS1 Programming Feedback

With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), there are proposals to replace human Teaching Assistants (TAs) with LLM-based AI agents for providing feedback to students. In this paper, we explore a new hybrid model where human TAs receive AI-generated feedback for CS1 programming exercises, which they can then review and modify as needed. We conducted a large-scale randomized intervention with 185 CS1 undergraduate students, comparing the efficacy of this hybrid approach against manual feedback and direct AI-generated feedback.