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🧠Anthropic Research Reveals Vibe Coding Can Impair Skills; But There’s a Fix
A new study shows AI assistance reduces learning by 17%, but three interaction patterns preserve skill development. Here’s what every developer needs to know
Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I’m a staff software engineer. I build and scale products to millions of users. On this blog I share news and insights about software engineering, AI, and the tech industry.
People focus on the study “How AI Impacts Skill Formation” that on the surface may suggest vibe coding impairs software engineering skills. But there’s more to it, and the study gives us some tips how to get better at programming with AI without the negative effects.
In a lot of comments on this study people miss one important detail: it was an analysis of how people handle working with a new library. The Trio library is less popular than asyncio (based on StackOverflow questions), so while AI may have some training data on it, participants had never used it before.
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This is important because it shows not how AI impacts programmers in general, but how AI use impacts learning things that are new to you. The…
