“Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition.

Kevin Beaumont

“Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.”

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills

GlennW

@GossiTheDog or, doing the easy way does not make you a master

Earthshine

@GossiTheDog idiocracy is looking more real every year

Matt Palmer

@Glennamaddy nor does watching something else do the work.

Ben Hardill

@GossiTheDog From the "No Shit Sherlock" school of research

Matt Palmer

@GossiTheDog to the LLM booster club, this will simply be interpreted as "we need to LLM harder, so as to completely replace workers as soon as possible".

datarama

@womble @GossiTheDog The study was by Anthropic, so that is *exactly* the intended interpretation.

random thoughts

@GossiTheDog

This is by design. Just like production lines destroyed artisanship for working classes, this will destroy the knowledge-based roles for the middle classes. You are no longer valued if you have wide breadth of knowledge. You are obsolete. You can't even specialize in a particular topic.

Corb_The_Lesser

@GossiTheDog Not thinking leads to not thinking.

Nicole Parsons

@GossiTheDog

Look at it from the perspective of the investors of AI.

1. What is Saudi Arabia & UAE getting for its $100 billion when the consequences are pyrrhic?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-06/saudis-plan-100-billion-ai-powerhouse-to-rival-uae-s-tech-hub

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technology/saudi-arabia-ai-exporter.html

Answer: kneecapping a necessity like a fossil fuel phase out.

2. What are the billionaires of Koch Network getting for their $1 billion propaganda campaign pushing AI?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/07/17/bill-gates-charles-koch-and-three-other-billionaires-are-giving-1-billion-to-enhance-economic-mobility-in-the-us/

https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch-network-is-pushing-trump-to-accelerate-ai-documents-show/

Answer: permanent rule under a White Supremacist Constitution

Bad News Nobody

@GossiTheDog who cares, soon there'll be no need for human coders anymore, whatever remains of the profession will be janitorial in nature. /s

Gabriel Adrian Samfira

@GossiTheDog this is no different than doing excessive hand holding as a mentor. When you answer questions instead of helping the mentee to fundamentally understand the thing they're asking about, and figuring out the issue for themselves (with your help), you take away from the valuable mental process that develops critical thinking and problem solving.

And a LLM does precisely this. It answers all your questions. You get the result. You never figure out the problem for yourself.

Volker Stolz

@GossiTheDog We’ll be busy removing this “digital asbestos” out of any software written this decade(?) for ages…

Little Art Histories

@GossiTheDog I wonder which impact this will have on society. Not that people become more stupid, etc. but the mental impact - can it lead to bore-out? Depression? Mental illness? Because our brains are craving activity.
The other concern is the erosion of the average jobs. What's left is work for unskilled workers or highly educated specialists. Which is also a problem in the long run. But, I guess, that's what they want. Cheap, unskilled labour with brain rot.

War in Pieces

@GossiTheDog indeed

i am living proof of this effect.

damianwalsh

@GossiTheDog Our study, conducted by Professor No Shit and Doctor Obvious, found that when people offloaded their thinking to AI, they put in less effort and were less engaged, creating a barrier to personal development in exchange for a marginal increase in productivity.

Little Art Histories

@womble @GossiTheDog It is so dumb when you look at it. They are complaining when people don't have a job because they are laid off, complaining that people are lazy wellfare-queens and at the same time want AI to replace every single job. It's the same with the old "Immigrants are lazy and getting our hard-earned money doing nothing while taking all our jobs".

I am pretty much convinced at this point that Capitalism is a cult, an addiction, and a scam.

filobus · 24-11-06/saudis-plan-100-billion-ai-powerhouse-to-rival-uae-s-tech-hub

@GossiTheDog @Npars01 first link seems to be broken

ckfinite

@GossiTheDog I was really (positively) surprised that Anthropic released this. Their results broadly align with my personal experience and feelings about AI usage, though I have substantial misgivings about their methodology (in particular how they controlled for participant experience).

Another issue that I worry a lot about with AI is second-order effects, wherein you use the LLM to write a library and then are expected to be able to evaluate the LLM's ability to use the LLM-written library. I think that this is both a priori very hard (to know all of the details of the library to be able to catch issues) and is lossy (in issues in library design or abstraction factoring that may be identified through use implementation).

Nicole Parsons

@filobus @GossiTheDog

Thanks! Fixed it.