We'll see how I feel in the morning, but for now i seem to have convinced myself to actually read that fuckin anthropic paper

So, back to the paper.

"How AI Impacts Skill Formation"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

The very first sentence of the abstract:

> AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers.

1. The evidence for this is mixed, and the effect is small.
2. That's not even the purpose of this study. The design of the study doesn't support drawing conclusions in this area.

Of course, the authors will repeat this claim frequently. Which brings us back to MY priors, which is that this is largely a political document.

@inthehands Right, it's not universally the case. There are bad instructors and bad instructional contexts.

@jenniferplusplus It's less a claim and more an intentionally-unsubstantiated background premise which the supposed research will treat as an assumed truth.

> As AI development progresses, the problem of supervising more and more capable AI systems becomes more difficult if humans have weaker abilities to understand code [Bowman et al., 2022]. When complex software tasks require human-AI collaboration,
humans still need to understand the basic concepts of code development even if their software skills are
complementary to the strengths of AI [Wang et al., 2020].

Right, sure. Except, there is actually a third option. But it's one that seems inconceivable to the authors. That is to not use AI in this context. I'm not even necessarily arguing* that's better. But if this is supposed to be sincere scholarship, how is that not even under consideration?

*well, I am arguing that, in the context of AI as a political project. If you had similar programs that were developed and deployed in a way that empowers people, rather than disempowers them, this would be a very different conversation. Of course, I would also argue that very same political project is why it's inconceivable to the authors, soooo

"AI" is not actually a technology, in the way people would commonly understand that term.

If you're feeling extremely generous, you could say that AI is a marketing term for a loose and shifting bundle of technologies that have specific useful applications.

I am not feeling so generous.

AI is a technocratic political project for the purpose of industrializing knowledge work. The details of how it works are a distant secondary concern to the effect it has, which is to enclose and capture all knowledge work and make it dependent on capital.

I just

I'm not actually in the habit of reading academic research papers like this. Is it normal to begin these things by confidently asserting your priors as fact, unsupported by anything in the study?

I suppose I should do the same, because there's no way it's not going to inform my read on this

> We find that using AI assistance to complete
tasks that involve this new library resulted in a reduction in the evaluation score by 17% or two grade
points (Cohen’s d = 0.738, p = 0.010). Meanwhile, we did not find a statistically significant acceleration in
completion time with AI assistance.

I mean, that's an enormous effect. I'm very interested in the methods section, now.

> Through an in-depth qualitative analysis where we watch the screen recordings of every participant in our
main study, we explain the lack of AI productivity improvement through the additional time some participants
invested in interacting with the AI assistant.

...

Is this about learning, or is it about productivity!? God.

> We attribute the gains in skill development of the control group to the process of encountering and subsequently resolving errors independently

Hm. Learning with instruction is generally more effective than learning through struggle. A surface level read would suggest that the stochastic chatbot actually has a counter-instructional effect. But again, we'll see what the methods actually are.

And then we switch back to background context. We get a 11 sentences of AI = productivity. Then 3 sentences on "cognitive offloading". 4 sentences on skill retention. And 4 on "over reliance". So, fully 50% of the background section of the "AI Impacts on Skill Formation" paper is about productivity.

Chapter 3. Framework.

Finally.

Paraphrasing a little: "the learning by doing" philosphy connects completing real world tasks with learning new concepts and developing new skills. Experiental learning has also been explored to mimic solving real world problems. We focus on settings where workers must acquire new skills to complete tasks. We seek to understand both the impact of AI on productivity
and skill formation. We ask whether AI assistance presents a tradeoff between immediate productivity and longer-term skill development or if AI assistance presents a shortcut to enhance both.

Right. There it is again: productivity. Even within this framing, there are at least 3 more possibilities. That AI does not actually increase productivity; that AI has no effect at all; or that AI improves learning only. I think it's very telling that the authors don't even conceive of these options. Particularly the last one.

But I'm becoming more and more convinced that the framing of productivity as an essential factor to measure and judge by is itself the whole purpose of this paper. And, specifically, productivity as defined by production output. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

@inthehands @jenniferplusplus One of my personal hesitance to use the LLM tools much (despite incredible professional pressure to do so) is that my use of it (again, under professional necessity) has re-enforced my pre-existing belief that struggling through a problem, debugging and digging through source and so on has been CRITICAL to my skill development. It is something I have for (uh) 15+ years told less experienced software developers is critical to getting better / faster!

@jenniferplusplus "Learning with instruction is generally more effective than learning through struggle"

I'm not sure I agree! Desirable difficulties literature and metacognition lit both agree short term failures can lead to better long term retention (people's lack of belief in this is often pointed to as a reason we engage in inefficient problem solving). That is one reason project based learning can sometimes beat sage on a stage lectures

Eg classic lit here: https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/04/EBjork_RBjork_2011.pdf

@dalias Honestly, yes. I suspect the purpose of this paper is to reinforce that production is a correct and necessary factor to consider when making decisions about AI.

And secondarily, I suspect it's establishing justification for blaming workers for undesirable outcomes; it's our fault for choosing to learn badly.

> We find that using AI assistance to complete
tasks that involve this new library resulted in a reduction in the evaluation score by 17% or two grade
points (Cohen’s d = 0.738, p = 0.010). Meanwhile, we did not find a statistically significant acceleration in
completion time with AI assistance.

I mean, that's an enormous effect. I'm very interested in the methods section, now.

> Through an in-depth qualitative analysis where we watch the screen recordings of every participant in our
main study, we explain the lack of AI productivity improvement through the additional time some participants
invested in interacting with the AI assistant.

...

Is this about learning, or is it about productivity!? God.

> We attribute the gains in skill development of the control group to the process of encountering and subsequently resolving errors independently

Hm. Learning with instruction is generally more effective than learning through struggle. A surface level read would suggest that the stochastic chatbot actually has a counter-instructional effect. But again, we'll see what the methods actually are.

And now we have actual research questions! It feels like it shouldn't take this long to get these, but w/e

1. Does AI assistance improve task completion productivity when new skills are required?
2. How does using AI assistance affect the development of these new skills?

We'll learn how the authors propose to answer these questions in the next chapter: Methods.

But first, there is a 6 year old in here demanding I play minecraft, and I'd rather do that.

To be continued... probbaly

@jenniferplusplus The purpose of a paper is the assumptions it makes.

@dalias Not all the time. But if it's research conducted and published by the in-house research team of Anthropic? Yeah, probably

@jenniferplusplus

There's a whole series of recent studies from MIT, CMU, Boston Consulting Group, BBC, and Oxford Economics arguing that AI/LLM assistants do NOT improve productivity.

Walk-through here:

https://www.someweekendreading.blog/ai-update-2026/