Hi, I have been to lectures fewer than 10 times throughout my entire master’s. No AI, no textbooks, just lecture slides and doing the (ungraded) weekly assignments.
It probably wasn’t a smart idea (incl. for my social life), but it also wasn’t hard to do.
Computer Science (at a rather “prestigious” university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that’s a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I’ve studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I’ve never seen any prof take attendance.
A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don’t see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.
In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.