> To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task3. During the exercise, all 52 participants could search the web and access instructions on how to do the task. Half of the participants were prompted to use an AI assistant as well.
> Afterwards, all of the software engineers were asked to complete a quiz about what they had learnt from the task. The participants who had used an AI assistant did significantly worse on the quiz than those who hadn’t: the average score was 50% in the AI group versus 67% in the non-AI group.
This doesn't strike me as a great test? Most engineers aren't going to learn anything from a basic coding task anyway, so I do wonder exactly what they were testing there. If it was just recall about what the issue was, then it doesn't really strike me as a problem - using AI to handle simple problems that it's clearly capable of dealing with is the right way to use it, and of course you're not going to spend time poring over the details because then you haven't saved any time by using AI.
There are other examples that don't strike me as particularly problematic, like GPS eroding people's sense of direction. It's totally reasonable to let a skill atrophy that you no longer really need because you have an ever-present tool to handle it. I'm a lot worse at doing long division than I was when I was .
The whole skill atrophy thing seems like much less of a problem than it's made out to be. We've been letting skills atrophy for good reason long before the advent of AI. If you start at McDonald's as a fry cook and work your way up to regional manager, if you suddenly have to work a shift on the fry station you're going to be worse than you were when you were doing it all the time. MDs at investment banks almost certainly can't put together a pitch deck as well as the junior bankers who are doing that task regularly. These things are fine - part of moving up in the world and having a broader impact is being able to successfully delegate tasks, and when you delegate tasks your skill at those tasks will atrophy. No real difference whether you're delegating them to AI or not.
To be clear, there are of course cases where skill atrophy is bad. iLoveOncall posted about senior engineers in their org who have lost all of those skills and their judgment along with them. That's definitely bad! If you delegate so much that you lose the ability to even judge good work, now you can't even delegate effectively any more.
I think the real lesson with AI is that you need to be self-aware about what skills you should practice and retain vs. what skills you can let atrophy, since it's easier than ever to hand things off. I've lost most of my ability to write a SQL query, but that's fine because it was only a skill I used intermittently and AI can always do the job fine at the level of complexity I need. I have not let my skill of writing product specs atrophy (I am a PM, in case you haven't read my username), because that's critical to using AI correctly in the first place.