How AI Impacts Skill Formation
Summary
This arXiv preprint from Anthropic Fellows investigates how AI assistance affects skill formation in software engineering. It reports that using AI to complete tasks involving a new library can impair conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging skills without delivering significant productivity gains on average, though some AI interaction patterns preserve learning. The work highlights six AI interaction patterns and argues for careful integration of AI into workflows to maintain long-term expertise, especially in safety-critical contexts.