Snowball Miracle: A Terminal, a Smarter AI Assistant, and Tighter Exam Controls

Welcome back. If you last taught in May, CodeGrade looks a little different this semester.

Over the summer we released Snowball Miracle, a named release that gathers everything we shipped into one place. It has four parts: a terminal in the browser editor, an AI assistant that can read a student's AutoTest results, firmer controls over exams and editor sessions, and the retirement of some long-deprecated API endpoints.

Here is each one, and what it asks of you.

1. A terminal, with tabs

Students and instructors can now work in a real command line right beside their code, without leaving CodeGrade. Nothing to install, and each session runs in its own isolated sandbox, so you get a real command-line experience with the safety and consistency of CodeGrade's managed environment.

The terminal opens as tabs, up to five at once. A student can leave a program running in one tab and keep working in another. If they reload the page, every tab comes back exactly as they left it, and closing the terminal pane no longer wipes out the sessions behind it.

The terminal is in beta and sits on the Advanced plan. Read more about The Terminal here.

2. An AI assistant that can see why the test failed

The AI assistant can now read a student's own AutoTest results. As soon as a test run finishes, it can tell you why a specific test passed or failed. No more guessing from the code alone.

One thing worth knowing: the assistant only ever sees results the student is already allowed to see. Hidden tests and unpublished scores stay private.

New assistants start on Claude Sonnet 5, which works out for itself how much reasoning a question needs, with access to the student's work switched on from the first message. That means it can refer to their code, notebooks, quizzes, AutoTest results and the assignment description without any extra setup. Every earlier model is still available and assistants you already built keep the model they were created with.

You'll also notice that assistant won't save until you've written its instructions. That's deliberate. An assistant with no instructions is an assistant you haven't decided anything about yet.

The AI Assistant is part of the AI add-on at $15 per student per course. You configure it per assignment, and every student conversation stays visible to you.

3. Exam and editor session controls

The exam controls now live together as one set. You can require an access password, restrict access to approved IP ranges, and set a scheduled entry window with a live countdown so students can only start inside it.

Per-student overrides let you give one student a different start and end time. That's what accommodations and staggered sittings actually need, and it used to take a workaround.

You also choose how much a student may paste into the editor at once.

For institutions that run a secure exam browser, CodeGrade now integrates with Schoolyear. Students take the exam inside Schoolyear's locked-down environment while working in CodeGrade as usual, and if their exam environment restarts, they pick up where they left off. You choose Schoolyear per course, alongside CodeGrade's own session lockdown. More in CodeGrade now integrates with Schoolyear.

And there's more coming on the exam front. Next up is an integration with Safe Exam Browser, the open-source lockdown browser many campuses already run on their lab machines, so you can use CodeGrade's own session lockdown together with the browser your institution has already installed. We're also working on exam login passwords: a short exam code plus a password you hand each student in the room, so anyone whose institution login needs a phone or a password manager can still start on time.

More on how these fit together on the exams page.

4. Retired API endpoints

This one is for the professors who script.

Snowball Miracle removes a set of API endpoints and fields that have been marked deprecated for a long time. Each one has a replacement in the current API, so nothing was removed without a substitute.

If you have a script that clones assignments across sections, sets up AutoTest steps in bulk, or pulls grades out at the end of term, run it before the semester starts rather than during it. Check it against the API documentation and update any calls that still hit a retired endpoint.

What this means for you

Two of these four need a decision from you. The terminal has to be switched on for your organisation and enabled where you want it. Exam controls only apply if you set them. Neither one is made for you.

The other two happen on their own. The AI assistant defaults apply to assistants you create from now on, not ones you already built. And the API endpoints are gone whether or not your script was ready.

One more thing if your institution runs Canvas. Moving a Canvas integration from LTI 1.1 to LTI 1.3 now keeps everything you've already set up. A launch finds the existing course and assignment instead of creating an empty duplicate, so submissions, grades and feedback stay untouched. If your IT team has been putting that migration off because of the risk, the risk now is a lot smaller. Email support@codegrade.com to get started.

What didn't change

Exam lockdown still locks the CodeGrade session, not the browser. Student can still open another tab. CodeGrade is not a proctoring tool, which is exactly why the Schoolyear and Lockdown Browser integrations exist. Nothing in this release changes that.

Your courses are where you left them. Assignments, AutoTest configurations, rubrics and past submissions all carry over, and nothing in this release requires you to rebuild anything.

LMS embedding is unchanged. CodeGrade still opens inside Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle and Brightspace, with grades syncing back on plans that include LMS integration.

Assistants you already configured keep their model and their system prompt. If you spent last spring tuning a Learning Assistant that never writes code, it still never writes code.

And the free tier is the same free tier. Nothing moved out of it in this release.

Try it

Most of Snowball Miracle is already there when you log in. The exam controls are in course and assignment settings. The AI assistant defaults apply to the next assistant you create.

The terminal and Schoolyear are the ones to ask about. The terminal is on the Advanced plan and support switches both on per organisation. Email support@codegrade.com if you'd like either for the autumn semester.

New here? Start with the part that's free. The autograder, the code editor, inline feedback and plagiarism detection are free for courses up to 50 students. No trial, no expiration. Start free, and see the pricing page for what Advanced adds.

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