Opinionated Read: How AI Impacts Skill Formation (opens in new tab)

The abstract to this preprint, by two authors both associated with Anthropic, makes the claim “We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcome...