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.

They lost me in the abstract when said “AI increase productivity especially with novice workers” From my experience, it was the most experienced and fluent in the engineering world who gained the most value from AI.

Is anyone else concerned about the huge, centralized dependency AI introduces into your workflow?

This is one reason I've been resistant to using it. I don't want my work to go to the companies providing the models. I don't trust them. Not only with my data in the first place, but also that they'll keep providing the service over the long term without totally enshittifying the experience.

I'll be so much more excited by this when local models catch up to (or even exceed) frontier-level quality. How close are we to this?

(In my case, I don't even care if it costs a boatload in hardware capital to deploy.)

I wonder why these Anthropic researchers chose GPT-4o for their study.

I'm already having flashbacks of how the tobacco industry faired..

> 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.

Guilt driven attempt to save jobs?

I guess its cool they published this paper, but the cynic in me says this is more a PR/optics move to reinforce the narrative that "we're an AI safety-first company" because "look see, we published a study that undermines our own company's benefit", while knowing full well that at the end of the day a majority of people in AI decision making positions are always going to push harder and harder for X thing to be done as fast as possible. So while the warning is "nice" I suppose, it feels sort of like Sam Altman talking about how OpenAI needs to be more regulated by the government meanwhile authors, artists, and publishers are suing because their work was actively being stolen.

Sure, it sounds good to call for more regulation, or admit that there are downsides to your product, but when you know these things are falling largely on deaf ears and you continue operating business as usual, I wonder how much of it is just theater.

I respect Anthoropic for writing an article like this. I can't imagine Sam Altman allowing someone to write something like this that is not a 100% advertisement of their own products or mightiness.