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How AI Impacts Skill Formation

arxiv.org · 12,551 words · saved by 1 readers

This is experimental HTML to improve accessibility. We invite you to report rendering errors. Use Alt+Y to toggle on accessible reporting links and Alt+Shift+Y to toggle off. Learn more about this project and help improve conversions. AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of

How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen Alex Tamkin Work done as a part of the Anthropic Fellows Program, judy@anthropic.com Anthropic, atamkin@anthropic.com Abstract AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained master

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