Alfred Hermida

🚨 BREAKING: Anthropic just published a study proving their own AI makes you worse at learning new skills. Not some outside critic taking shots. The company that made Claude themselves. They put together this experiment with about fifty developers learning a brand new programming library they'd never seen before. One group had AI help the whole way through. The other group went at it without any assistance. The ones with AI felt productive as hell. Answers came quick. They were shipping code left and right. Everything felt smooth. Then the tests hit. Real understanding of the library? The AI group got crushed. Weaker conceptual grasp. They struggled more just reading through code. Debugging became a nightmare. The AI had been doing the thinking so their own brains never had to step up. I caught myself doing the exact same thing a while back when I was forcing through a new framework. Felt like a genius until I had to explain it without the chat open. Brutal. They went deeper and mapped out the different ways people actually interact with these tools while coding. Only some of those ways let real learning happen. The others give you this fake sense of progress — you're moving fast, tasks are getting done, but your actual skill level stays zero. The worst offender by far was full delegation. People who just handed the whole thing over to the AI got a little speed boost but walked away knowing less than they did at the start. They used the tool. The tool used their time. And here's what really lands different. This isn't some random researcher warning about AI from the outside. These folks work at Anthropic. They build the models. They put this line straight in the paper: AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence. That sentence is going to stick with a lot of people. The thing is, this isn't just about developers. Every field right now is pushing beginners to use AI to "learn faster." Law, medicine, writing, data stuff, finance, engineering you name it. But if leaning on AI during the actual learning phase quietly damages how real competence forms, then we've got a generation building careers on ground that was never properly packed down. They can get the model to spit out answers. Thinking for themselves when it counts? Different story. What they also pointed out that most people are missing completely is that the skills you'll need to properly supervise AI in the future the deep understanding, the ability to read between the lines, to catch its mistakes are exactly the ones getting eroded right now. You can't audit what you never learned to build yourself. It's kind of like learning guitar by only ever playing along with perfect backing tracks and auto-tune. You can perform songs pretty quick, but take the training wheels off in a real jam session and suddenly your ear and timing never developed the way they should have. Anthropic isn't out here saying ditch the AI completely. They're saying learn the thing first on its own terms. Bring the AI in after. If you're starting something new, maybe sit in the suck for a bit longer than feels comfortable before calling in the assistant.