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research memo

Source Article

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills

Published

Jan 2026

Article Body

Web View

Research shows AI helps people do parts of their job faster. In an observational study of Claude.ai data, we found AI can speed up some tasks by 80%. But does this increased productivity come with trade-offs? Other research shows that when people use AI assistance, they become less engaged with their work and reduce the effort they put into doing it - in other words, they offload their thinking to AI.

It's unclear whether this cognitive offloading can prevent people from growing their skills on the job, or - in the case of coding - understanding the systems they're building. Our latest study, a randomized controlled trial with software developers as participants, investigates this potential downside of using AI at work.

This question has broad implications - for how to design AI products that facilitate learning, for how workplaces should approach AI policies, and for broader societal resilience, among others. We focused on coding, a field where AI tools have rapidly become standard. Here, AI creates a potential tension: as coding grows more automated and speeds up work, humans will still need the skills to catch errors, guide output, and ultimately provide oversight for AI deployed in high-stakes environments. Does AI provide a shortcut to both skill development and increased efficiency? Or do productivity increases from AI assistance undermine skill development?

In a randomized controlled trial, we examined 1) how quickly software developers picked up a new skill (in this case, a Python library) with and without AI assistance; and 2) whether using AI made them less likely to understand the code they'd just written.

We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they'd used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn't reach the threshold of statistical significance.

Importantly, using AI assistance didn't guarantee a lower score. How someone used AI influenced how much information they retained. The participants who showed stronger mastery used AI assistance not just to produce code but to build comprehension while doing so - whether by asking follow-up questions, requesting explanations, or posing conceptual questions while coding independently.

Source

anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills

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Available On

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Download App

Turn articles, newsletters, and PDFs into your private podcast.

Everything you save becomes an episode

Weekly newsletter issue

Research paper or whitepaper

Forwarded email update

Saved article from the web

Make reading fit the rest of your day

Keep up while you walk, drive, or work out

Stop saving things you never get back to

Choose the version that fits your goal

A personal email address for things you want to hear

Forward Emails

Subscribe With It

Choose how you want to listen

Full Article

Key Points

Simple Explanation

Guided Walkthrough

Devil's Advocate

Quick Summary

Save anywhere, listen anywhere

Chrome Extension

iPhone App

Android App

Turn your reading into listening time with Spkr.

Turn your reading
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