As some of the world’s largest tech firms look to AI to write code, new research shows that relying too much on AI can impede skill acquisition in junior developers.
AI may be able to help complete some types of work, like coding, faster. But it may come at the cost of actually getting better at what you’re doing and mastering new skills in the process, new research shows.
AI firm Anthropic, which develops the ChatGPT-competitor Claude, conducted the study on 52 junior software engineers. The participants were given a series of Python-based coding tasks, preceded by a short warm-up, and then quizzed on the skills they learned afterward. The whole process lasted about one hour and 15 minutes.
The researchers found that the group given AI assistance finished the tasks two minutes faster than the non-AI group, but generally performed far worse on the quiz afterward. The AI group averaged 50% on the post-task quiz, compared to 67% in the non-AI coding group. The largest gap in scores between the two groups was on debugging questions, where programmers were asked how to fix faulty code.
