Comment by keeda

For coding specifically (there are many studies out there by now, but I know of these offhand):

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4115 -- probably the earliest one of its kind, finds over-reliance degrades critical skills but supplementary use is mostly harmless.

https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 -- Anthropic's study, same as above except supplementary use (like clarifying concepts) can actually be beneficial.

https://scale.stanford.edu/ai/repository/ai-meets-classroom-... -- "Students who use LLMs as personal tutors by conversing about the topic and asking for explanations benefit from usage. However, learning is impaired for students who excessively rely on LLMs to solve practice exercises for them and thus do not invest sufficient own mental effort." Interestingly, they found simply disabling copy-paste on the chatbot interface resulted in better outcomes!

Beyond coding, I recently came across this new meta-study; largely positive findings (which it admits may be biased) but does highlight evidence of negative effects of over-reliance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

(Multiple studies find that the outcome depends on how AI is used. Surprisingly, incorrect guidance / unreliability / hallucinations appear to be a bigger problem than over-reliance! That could also explain poor performance in some cases.)

My intuition, supported by these studies, is that as long as students are willing to do the hard cognitive work -- for which there is no substitute, really -- having LLM assistance is a boon. Which makes sense, it's comparable to having a tutor explain difficult concepts. This is why in my mind the real problem is that the incentives to use AI as a crutch are just too strong.