Soma Mbadiwe

This post draws practical lessons from How AI Impacts Skill Formation by Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin at Anthropic. For a summary of the study, see AI Makes You Faster But Dumber?. For a critical analysis, see The Skill Tax of AI Coding. The Two-Line Summary Anthropic’s study found that developers who used AI assistance scored 17% lower on a mastery quiz, but developers who used AI to ask questions and build understanding scored nearly as well as those who coded without AI at all. ...

This post is a critical analysis of How AI Impacts Skill Formation by Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin at Anthropic. For a summary of the study’s findings, see my companion post AI Makes You Faster But Dumber?. Why This Study Matters Let me start with what’s genuinely praiseworthy: Anthropic, an AI company that directly profits from increased AI usage, published a rigorous study showing a meaningful downside of using their own technology. That takes institutional integrity. The study itself, a pre-registered, randomized controlled trial with screen recordings and careful evaluation design, is methodologically stronger than most work in this space, which tends toward observational surveys or anecdotal evidence. ...

This post is based on How AI Impacts Skill Formation by Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin at Anthropic, and the accompanying blog post. The Headline That Writes Itself “AI makes coders dumber.” You can practically hear the hot takes forming. And on the surface, the numbers seem to support it: in a randomized controlled trial, developers who used AI assistance scored 17% lower on a mastery quiz compared to those who coded by hand. That’s the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. ...

Introduction: Messaging as a Strategic Function Effective communication is the cornerstone of the modern digital relationship between an enterprise and its users. Messaging, defined here as any asynchronous, non-interactive transmission of information to a user regarding their account, activity, or engagement, transcends mere delivery. It represents a critical, multi-dimensional system requiring strategic planning across channel selection, content design, compliance, and systems observability. Treating messaging as a core architectural concern—rather than an ancillary feature—is essential for maintaining trust, security, and a positive user experience. ...

All over the world, the Wuhan Virus (COVID-19) has upended life as we know it. The The “social distancing” being recommended by experts seems to be having unintended consequences. Schools are closing, churches are cancelling services, major sporting, musing and entertainment events are being cancelled or postponed. Across grocery shops, shelves are literally empty due to panic buying. Even worse, a growing number of countries have closed their borders. This situation is somewhat similar to the situation in the late ’40s, when the world was recovering from the devastating effects of the nuclear bombs dropped in Japan in 1945. There was a real fear of the so-called nuclear apocalypse, especially given the number of countries that had nuclear weapons. It was in such a time that C.S. Lewis wrote the following, to addres the situation and encourage his audience. Those words are especially relevant today. Here they are: ...

I have been living my life writing web apps with MVC5 until I ran into this weird problem. It happened because I put a generic method in my controller (I had a base controller, but that’s by the way). I implemented some functionalities using Command Pattern and thought I could retrieve my command handler within a controller using the simple call: 1 2 var handler = CommandHandler<TCommand>(); handler.Handle(command); Well, I got the error: Cannot call action method on controller because the action method is a generic method. So I ended up writing a solution where I now call ...

If you’ve ever looked at Windows Event Logs, you must have noticed that it logs too many information, most of which are not useful when you’re actually trying to do some kind of forensics. To reduce this noise, I went to build a proof-of-concept Windows Service whose only task is to log users’ session activities (Lock, Unlock, Logout, Login, etc) in a different place, thus giving me a much smaller log file to dig through. ...

Sometime ago, I built an ASP.NET site for a client and hosted it on GoDaddy public shared server. Soon enough, the need arose to back up all data generated periodically. Even though GoDaddy offers database backup, we did not have extra cash for that, so I had to innovate, creating a solution that connects to the server and brings down my data from some or all my tables whenever I want them, at no cost. The rest of the post is a summary of what I did. Use it as a guide if you are in a situation similar to the one I described above. ...

OK, I admit this error tripped me off. If it were a file I created, I would have simply moved things around to reduce the filename length. But the error was coming from Visual Studio, specifically, from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets. And, sgen: what’s that? It turns out sgen is just an XML serializer generator - something I clearly don’t use or need. The .targets file above contained a task referencing Sgen. So, what now: comment it out? ...

Bioinformatics is the design, construction and use of software tools to generate, store, annotate and analyse data and information relating to Molecular Biology. Many people, like me, come into this field of study without a background in biological sciences, thus require at least some knowledge of biology to better make sense of the literature. The good news is you don’t need a degree program worth of knowledge to get started. You can get started with just a few key pieces of information and learn more as you grow and go deeper. In fact, many of the pioneers of molecular biology (e.g. Max Delbrück and Erwin Schrödinger) had no background in biology too, so you’re not alone. ...