Learning

You learned Python from a textbook. Maybe you got through most of it, wrote some scripts, did some exercises, felt pretty good about it. Then life happened and you stepped away. Now someone has told you that you need to work with .NET, and you’re staring at a wall of unfamiliar terminology: C#, NuGet, ASP.NET, Entity Framework, Visual Studio, solution files, namespaces… Take a breath. This guide is designed to get you from “I sort of know Python” to “I can build and understand real .NET applications” as efficiently as possible. No filler, no 40-hour course recommendations. Just the path that matters. ...

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. ...