How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
by vismit2000 on 1/30/2026, 5:41:23 AM
https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
Comments
by: omnicognate
An important aspect of this for professional programmers is that learning is not something that happens as a beginner, student or "junior" and then stops. The <i>job</i> is learning, and after 25 years of doing it I learn more per day than ever.
1/30/2026, 8:02:42 AM
by: dr_dshiv
Go Anthropic for transparency and commitment to science.<p>Personally, I’ve never been learning software development <i>concepts</i> faster—but that’s because I’ve been offloading actual development to other people for years.
1/30/2026, 7:29:19 AM
by: qweiopqweiop
It makes sense - juniors are coding faster but not understanding anything. Ironically it'll stop them getting more experienced despite feeling good. What I'm interested in is if the same applies for Senior+ developers. The soft signals are that people are feeling the atrophy but who knows...
1/30/2026, 9:38:15 AM
by: keeda
Another study from 2024 with similar findings: <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115" rel="nofollow">https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115</a> -- a bit more preliminary, but conducted with undergrad students still learning to program, so I expect the effect would be even more pronounced.<p>This similarly indicates that reliance on LLM correlates with degraded performance in critical problem-solving, coding and debugging skills. On the bright side, using LLMs as a supplementary learning aid (e.g. clarifying doubts) showed no negative impact on critical skills.<p>This is why I'm skeptical of people excited about "AI native" junior employees coming in and revamping the workplace. I haven't yet seen any evidence that AI can be effectively harnessed without some domain expertise, and I'm seeing mounting evidence that relying too much on it hinders building that expertise.<p>I think those who wish to become experts in a domain would willingly eschew using AI in their chosen discipline until they've "built the muscles."
1/30/2026, 9:07:23 AM
by: MzxgckZtNqX5i
Duplicate?<p>Submission about the arXiv pre-print: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821360">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821360</a>
1/30/2026, 8:08:20 AM