The Skill Tax of AI Coding Assistance: What The Study Missed
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. ...