Comment by jbellis

Good to see that Anthropic is honest and open enough to publish a result with a mostly negative headline.

> Importantly, using AI assistance didn’t guarantee a lower score. How someone used AI influenced how much information they retained. The participants who showed stronger mastery used AI assistance not just to produce code but to build comprehension while doing so—whether by asking follow-up questions, requesting explanations, or posing conceptual questions while coding independently.

This might be cynically taken as cope, but it matches my own experience. A poor analogy until I find a better one: I don't do arithmetic in my head anymore, it's enough for me to know that 12038 x 912 is in the neighborhood of 10M, if the calculator gives me an answer much different from that then I know something went wrong. In the same way, I'm not writing many for loops by hand anymore but I know how the code works at a high level and how I want to change it.

(We're building Brokk to nudge users in this direction and not a magic "Claude take the wheel" button; link in bio.)