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Erik Jonker
Erik Jonker
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 10 hours ago

Interesting read, it illustrates the challenge we have with regard to learning in a world with AI. We have to take measures for that because use of AI in coding is not going away and will only increase.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245
#AI #Coding #learning #skills

arXiv.org

How AI Impacts Skill Formation

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 learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation -- particularly in safety-critical domains.
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Troed Sångberg
Troed Sångberg
@troed@swecyb.com replied  ·  activity timestamp 10 hours ago

@ErikJonker Exactly. While I often laugh at the sorry quality of AI produced code (esp. from a cybersec perspective!) I use it myself every now and then for tasks where I find it brings benefit.

The whole "either your totally against or you vibe code everything" stance is just maddening to watch. It's a tool among many.

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Peter H
Peter H
@peter_slwk@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 9 hours ago

@troed @ErikJonker Its a tool indeed!

I started programming in VIM/Notepad/Dos Edit and the likes. Then you got better tools, code prediction, automatic closing brackets, live error-checking, etc. Everything went faster and better.

AI, in my opinion, is just an extra tool that can speed up work when used correctly.

Like this article mentions, using it to impelment a new library isn't correct usage. How good is 'your' code when you can't determine how correct and safe it is?

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