Never-skilling: the research says juniors using AI never learn to debug
Research published this year has given a name to something employers have been circling for a while. Deskilling is what happens when an expert stops practising and gets worse. Never-skilling is what happens when a novice never gets good in the first place, and it is the more awkward problem, because the people it affects are the ones companies are already hiring fewer of.
The sharpest evidence comes from a randomised controlled trial run by Anthropic researchers Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin, published in January.
They recruited 52 mostly junior software engineers, gave half of them an AI assistant, asked all of them to learn Trio, a Python library none of them knew, and then quizzed everyone on the concepts they had used minutes before.
The AI group averaged 50%. The hand-coding group averaged 67%. Anthropic describes the gap as the equivalent of nearly two letter grades,...
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