Jared Huling

How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen∗ Alex Tamkin† February 3, 2026 Abstract AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation – particularly in safety-critical domains.

Interesting paper, especially interesting it's coming from researchers at Anthropic arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Ok, how about this happens at the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall, instead?

I've never been more proud to call Minneapolis my home

Open Letter to Minnesota Law CommunityJanuary 25 January 25, 2026 To the Minnesota Law Community: We, the undersigned faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School, write in our individual capacities to address the federal government's ongoin...

Standing with 65 of my UMN Law colleagues (and counting) to condemn ICE’s lawless conduct towards Minnesotans: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

With AI having such an influence on grant writing now, I find it harder and harder to justify the way things are done now

How do you think you’ll feel when the paramilitary drives by your kid’s elementary school in a show of force? I hope you never have to find out.

Excited for the polar vortex!

!!!

oof, I really do not like the updated guard railing. kills what was the best view in town

Whenever I see one of these I immediately think of Greece. I've never seen them anywhere else

I've never been more proud to call Minneapolis my home

This isn't normal stress. Stress doesn't begin to describe it

Great to hear! I suppose I should have used a more pointed word than "considered"

Really surprising it's taken this long to consider doing this. The parkways have become a huge problem with mile long lines of motorists using it as a commuting "cut through", which it's clearly not designed for

Or on a day like today you can ski to go skiing after work

Paul was such an incredible person. He made time for everyone. He was patient, humble, and so so supportive. I'm so sad to hear he's gone

By the end of the spring semester, Gwen reached a breaking point with AI. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to be a Yale student,” she said. She thought that she was throwing away her education and the scholarship paying to support it. She decided to quit using ChatGPT altogether. She didn’t ask AI to help her sentences flow or to strike the right tone. She didn’t even use it to brainstorm. “I think that’s a skill you need to have on your own. That’s the core of being original, anyway.” Gwen recalled completing her final assignments without AI, sitting in the middle of a crowded library so that she felt watched. “I struggled. And they weren’t very good.” It was only then, she said, that she started to understand just how much learning she had missed out on. ∎

New feature article from TNJ (nation's best student magazine): Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...

‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

from my own ride today. endless beautiful scenery to get out and enjoy in the Twin Cities!

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually.

The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

unabashedly a fan of deli notation

Now that's what I call probability!

I can assure you the reviewers have never been in love with my work 😂

A lot of people invoke "ML" when they're not doing ML. That doesn't make ML bad

this isn't causal inference, this is just people being lazy/doing stupid stuff

Also debugging code you don't fully understand the "logic" behind takes much longer than debugging something you thought carefully about and made yourself

Would like to see the details of this study, but this does track with my experience -- AI is likely not helping you as much as you think it is even for basic things like coding

garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-n...

I absolutely think that for the majority of users it definitely is a crutch to replace critical thinking. It *can* be used without that being the case, but it most often seems not to be

Bike infrastructure like this is worse than no infrastructure at all