by: postalcoder

One of the nice things about the &quot;dumber&quot; models (like GPT-4) was that it was good enough to get you really far, but never enough to complete the loop. It gave you maybe 90%. 20% of which you had to retrace -- so you had to do 30% of the tough work yourself, which meant manually learning things from scratch.<p>The models are too good now. One thing I&#x27;ve noticed recently is that I&#x27;ve stopped dreaming about tough problems, be it code or math. The greatest feeling in the world is pounding your head against a problem for a couple of days and waking up the next morning with the solution sketched out in your mind.<p>I don&#x27;t think the solution is to be going full natty with things, but to work more alongside the code in an editor, rather than doing things in CLI.

1/30/2026, 9:35:50 AM

by: jwr

The title of this submission is misleading, that&#x27;s not what they&#x27;re saying. They said it doesn&#x27;t show productivity gains for inexperienced developers still gaining knowledge.

1/30/2026, 7:57:54 AM

by: gergo_b

When I use AI to write code, after a week or 2, if I go back to the written code I have a hard time catching up. When I write code by myself I always just look at it and I understand what I did.

1/30/2026, 9:02:38 AM

by: northfield27

Edit: Changed title<p>Previous title: &quot;Anthropic: AI Coding shows no productivity gains; impairs skill development&quot;<p>The previous title oversimplified the claim to &quot;all&quot; developers. I found the previous title meaningful while submitting this post because most of the false AI claims of &quot;software engineer is finished&quot; has mostly affected junior `inexperienced` engineers. But I think `junior inexperienced` was implicit which many people didn&#x27;t pick.<p>The paper makes a more nuanced claim that AI Coding speeds up work for inexperienced developers, leading to some productivity gains at the cost of actual skill development.

1/30/2026, 8:24:57 AM

by: simonw

Key snippet from the abstract:<p>&gt; 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.<p>The library in question was Python trio and the model they used was GPT-4o.

1/30/2026, 8:05:43 AM

by: visarga

Many say generative AI is like a vending machine. But if your vending machine has not 1 button but a keyboard, and you type anything you want in, and it makes it (Star Trek Replicator) and you use it 10,000 times to refine your recipes, did you learn something or not? How about a 3D printer, do you learn something making designs and printing them?

1/30/2026, 8:49:58 AM

by: comrade1234

Often when I use it I know that there is a way to do something and I know that I could figure it out by going through some api documents and maybe finding some examples on the web... IOW I already have something in mind.<p>For example I wanted to add a rate-limiter to an api call with proper http codes, etc. I asked the ai (in IntelliJ it used to be Claude by default but they&#x27;ve since switched to Gemini as default) to generate one for me. The first version was not good so I asked it to do it again but with some changes.<p>What would take me a couple of hours or more took less than 10 minutes.

1/30/2026, 8:16:22 AM

by: vessenes

@dang the title here is bait. I’d suggest the paper title: “Anthropic: How AI Impacts Skill Formation”

1/30/2026, 8:06:44 AM

by: grahamlee

I’ve been making the case (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uL8LiUu9M64?si=-XBHFMrz99VZsaAa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uL8LiUu9M64?si=-XBHFMrz99VZsaAa</a> [1]) that we have to be intentional about using AI to augment our skills, rather than outsourcing understanding: great to see Anthropic confirming that.<p>[1] plug: this is a video about the Patreon community I founded to do exactly that. Just want to make sure you’re aware that’s the pitch before you do ahead and watch.

1/30/2026, 8:07:09 AM

by: gezman7

They lost me in the abstract when said “AI increase productivity especially with novice workers” From my experience, it was the most experienced and fluent in the engineering world who gained the most value from AI.

1/30/2026, 8:58:44 AM

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1/30/2026, 8:04:26 AM

by: baalimago

I&#x27;ve noticed this as well. I delegate to agentic coders on tasks I need to have done efficiently, which I could do myself and lack time to do. Or on tasks which are in areas I simply don&#x27;t care much for, for languages which I don&#x27;t like very much etc

1/30/2026, 7:59:29 AM

by: simonw

I wonder why these Anthropic researchers chose GPT-4o for their study.

1/30/2026, 8:03:51 AM

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1/30/2026, 7:06:47 AM

by: kaelandt

Nice to see an AI coding company allow such studies to come out, and it looks decently designed

1/30/2026, 7:57:38 AM

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1/30/2026, 8:23:03 AM

by: reedf1

This is a fancy way of saying that if you invent the calculator, people get worse at sums. I&#x27;m not an AI doomer or a boomer - but it&#x27;s clear to me that some skills will be permanently relegated to AI.

1/30/2026, 8:29:40 AM