Anthropic AI just did their own study of software engineers and admitted that relying on AI stunts skills

[highplainsdem]

There was a long thread about this on X, but fortunately there's also a post on their website that anyone can read

https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills

and the full study is here

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

available in PDF or HTML form.

Those can be read in their entirety. But I noticed that the thread on X, posted on January 29, offered the best summary of their findings in the first 4 tweets.This is the text from those:

AI can make work faster, but a fear is that relying on it may make it harder to learn new skills on the job.

We ran an experiment with software engineers to learn more. Coding with AI led to a decrease in mastery—but this depended on how people used it.

In a randomized-controlled trial, we assigned one group of junior engineers to an AI-assistance group and another to a no-AI group.

Both groups completed a coding task using a Python library they’d never seen before. Then they took a quiz covering concepts they’d just used.

Participants in the AI group finished faster by about two minutes (although this wasn’t statistically significant).

But on average, the AI group also scored significantly worse on the quiz—17% lower, or roughly two letter grades.

However, some in the AI group still scored highly while using AI assistance.

When we looked at the ways they completed the task, we saw they asked conceptual and clarifying questions to understand the code they were working with—rather than delegating or relying on AI.

The first reply I saw under that thread, with about a thousand likes, was this:

“we improved coding speed by 2 minutes and melted 17% of the skills” is the most honest summary of 2025–2026 AI dev culture i’ve seen so far

Btw, that actually understates the dumbing-down via AI, because they found that the engineers who relied most on AI scored 27% lower on the quiz, getting only 40% right.

The intro to the study at https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245 :

AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. 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 outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation -- particularly in safety-critical domains.

This is what use of AI does to stunt learning in adult software engineers.

Think of what it's doing to kids in school. And the AI peddlers keep pushing for it to be used more and more.

Kudos to Anthropic for publishing the study results.

[Renew Deal]

1. You're right, but will those skills matter in the future?

We’re headed for a place where many of these skills won’t be needed in the future. These are just the first indicators. I’m not convinced it’s better, but it’s looking inevitable.

[highplainsdem]

4. Generative AI models are badly flawed, inherently flawed, which is why they should never be used by

anyone without careful checking, if they're being used for anything important.

They can't be checked properly by anyone without the knowledge to understand what they're doing.

Use of genAI is NOT inevitable.

AI companies, peddlers and fans/addicts want everyone to believe it is, but that's simply pro-AI propaganda. Which the AI bros are good at. Sam Altman especially.

But it's bullshit.

As I've mentioned here often, some people are temporarily forced to use genAI because of their schools or jobs. But they can and should point out why use of genAI is a bad idea.

No one else ever has to use genAI. If they do so when they know that technology exists only because of the theft of intellectual property, and they still use it for any reason, they're choosing to act unethically, giving a thumbs-up to AI robber barons, and showing contempt for all the people whose work was stolen.

If they know that using it can dumb them down and de-skill them, they're choosing that over using their own brain.

If they think that using genAI makes them smarter or more talented or more creative, they're being controlled by their egos and manipulated by pro-AI propaganda, and showing they haven't the slightest understanding of what real intelligence, talent and creativity are. Using genAI can't make anyone smarter, or turn them into a writer or visual artist or videographer or musician. It's plagiarism and fraud, and anyone who believes the AI bro line that AI "democratizes creativity" is delusional.

Although there are open source models, they're all still illegally trained and unreliable, and the best genAI models are owned and controlled by people who do not have the best interests of humanity at heart.

And if someone uses genAI for companionship, they're playing an insane game with an illusion of a companion designed to flatter and manipulate them, and the results can be tragic.

No one who gives much thought to what genAI is, what it does, whom it empowers, and whom it weakens and exploits, should ever want to use it.

[Disaffected]

2. Meh. Will be moot in any case

when software engineers aren't needed anymore.

[hunter]

3. AI is slowly polluting the well it draws from.

Who do you think will clean up the mess?