Is this the equivalent of cigarette companies putting “smoking kills” on their packaging?

Among the six patterns identified, it's interesting that "Iterative AI Debugging" takes more time (and possibly tokens) but results in worse scores than letting AI do everything. So this part really should be handed over to agent loops.

The three high score patterns are interesting as well. "Conceptual Inquiry" actually results in less time and doesn't improve the score than the other two, which is quite surprising to me.

The learning loop and LLMs [1] is well worth reading and the anthropic blog post above concurs with it in a number of places. It's fine to use LLMs as an assistant to understanding but your goal as an engineer should always be understanding and the only real way to do that is to have to struggle to make things yourself.

[1] https://martinfowler.com/articles/llm-learning-loop.html

@dang the title here is bait. I’d suggest the paper title: “Anthropic: How AI Impacts Skill Formation”

I've noticed this as well. I delegate to agentic coders on tasks I need to have done efficiently, which I could do myself and lack time to do. Or on tasks which are in areas I simply don't care much for, for languages which I don't like very much etc

From Plato's Phaedrus, on the invention of writing:

Theuth: "This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."

Thamus replied: "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

You have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Which is to say: "All this has happened before, and will happen again."

I find this so hard to get my head around. I am wildly more prolific with agentic coding. It's at minimum a 10x for the first several iterations and when you get into the heavy detail part I am still the choke point.

I’ve been making the case (e.g. https://youtu.be/uL8LiUu9M64?si=-XBHFMrz99VZsaAa [1]) that we have to be intentional about using AI to augment our skills, rather than outsourcing understanding: great to see Anthropic confirming that.

[1] plug: this is a video about the Patreon community I founded to do exactly that. Just want to make sure you’re aware that’s the pitch before you do ahead and watch.

Duplicate?

Submission about the arXiv pre-print: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821360

> For novice workers in software engineering or any other industry, our study can be viewed as a small piece of evidence toward the value of intentional skill development with AI tools.

TL;DR it's not AI that makes you dumb, it's the wrong "Output style" - just choose learning style.