From the conclusion of Anthropic’s article summarizing their own research into AI-assistance and skill formation:
Our results suggest that incorporating AI aggressively into the workplace, particularly with respect to software engineering, comes with trade-offs. The findings highlight that not all AI-reliance is the same: the way we interact with AI while trying to be efficient affects how much we learn. Given time constraints and organizational pressures, junior developers or other professionals may rely on AI to complete tasks as fast as possible at the cost of skill development—and notably the ability to debug issues when something goes wrong.
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. Cognitive effort—and even getting painfully stuck—is likely important for fostering mastery.
De-skilling is, I think, a real and serious problem. Under-skilling and never-skilling are potentially an even bigger deal, and fighting it could be a generational imperative. We need people to do some serious practice on hard mode so their learning isn’t short-circuited.