We'll see how I feel in the morning, but for now i seem to have convinced myself to actually read that fuckin anthropic paper
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So, back to the paper.
"How AI Impacts Skill Formation"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245The very first sentence of the abstract:
> AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers.
1. The evidence for this is mixed, and the effect is small.
2. That's not even the purpose of this study. The design of the study doesn't support drawing conclusions in this area.Of course, the authors will repeat this claim frequently. Which brings us back to MY priors, which is that this is largely a political document.
@jenniferplusplus oh gods I need to read this.
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@jenniferplusplus they don't understand it because their job depends on them not understanding it
@mattly I mean, yes. But still.
Maybe what I don't understand is why everyone else goes along with it.
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3. Code writing. Honestly, I don't get the impression they even understand what this means. They say "Low-level code writing, like remembering the syntax of functions, will be less important with further integration of AI coding tools
than high-level system design."Neither of those things is a meaningful facet of actually writing code. Writing code exists entirely in-between those two things. Code completion tools basically eliminate having to think about syntax (but we will return to this). And system design happens in the realm of abstract behaviors and responsibilities.
@jenniferplusplus Kind of a funny statement given that the whole point of abstraction, encapsulation, high level languages, etc. is to provide a formal basis for much of a program to be designed in terms of high level concepts
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So anyway, all of this is, apparently, in service to the "original motivation of developing and retaining the skills required for supervising automation."
Which would be cool, I'd like to read that study, because it isn't this one. This study is about whether the tools used to rapidly spit out meaningless code will impact one's ability to answer questions about the code that was spat. And even then, I'm not sure the design of the study can answer that question.
@jenniferplusplus That paper is _extremely damning_ of the use of AI for all that it bends over backwards and ties itself into knots to try to find some way of making it seem less catastrophically bad.
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@mattly I mean, yes. But still.
Maybe what I don't understand is why everyone else goes along with it.
@jenniferplusplus I was talking with a friend recently about their workplace's new mandate for using tokens,
and like, it's not “let's talk about this reasonably and decide what the best course of action is"
it's “get in losers, we're going to sloptown" and if you don't fall in line you're going to lose your job
and probably also some of the chatbot psychosis that kicks in with people who for all other metrics strike me as kratom addicts. They justify what they need to
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@jenniferplusplus That paper is _extremely damning_ of the use of AI for all that it bends over backwards and ties itself into knots to try to find some way of making it seem less catastrophically bad.
@hrefna it certainly doesn't make them look good. But I'm honestly not sure we can draw *any* conclusion from this study. Which I'm getting into now
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> We find that using AI assistance to complete
tasks that involve this new library resulted in a reduction in the evaluation score by 17% or two grade
points (Cohen’s d = 0.738, p = 0.010). Meanwhile, we did not find a statistically significant acceleration in
completion time with AI assistance.I mean, that's an enormous effect. I'm very interested in the methods section, now.
> Through an in-depth qualitative analysis where we watch the screen recordings of every participant in our
main study, we explain the lack of AI productivity improvement through the additional time some participants
invested in interacting with the AI assistant....
Is this about learning, or is it about productivity!? God.
> We attribute the gains in skill development of the control group to the process of encountering and subsequently resolving errors independently
Hm. Learning with instruction is generally more effective than learning through struggle. A surface level read would suggest that the stochastic chatbot actually has a counter-instructional effect. But again, we'll see what the methods actually are.
Edit: I should say, doing things with feedback from an instructor generally has better learning outcomes than doing things in isolation. I phrased that badly.
@jenniferplusplus
In a bit confusedAren't lower grades worse?
And it even took longer because of "AI distractions"? -
Found it! n=52. wtf. I reiterate: 20 billion dollars, just for this current funding round, and they only managed to do this study with 52 people.
But anyway, let's return to the methods themselves. They start with the design of the evaluation component, so I will too. It's organized around 4 evaluative practices they say are common in CS education. That seems fine, but their explanation for why these things are relevant is weird.
1. Debugging. According to them "this skill is curcial for detecting when AI-generated code is incorrect and understanding why it fails.
Maybe their definition is more expansive than it seems here? But it's been my experience, professionally, that this is just not the case. The only even sort-of reliable mechanism for detecting and understanding the shit behavior of slop code is extensive validation suites.
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So anyway, all of this is, apparently, in service to the "original motivation of developing and retaining the skills required for supervising automation."
Which would be cool, I'd like to read that study, because it isn't this one. This study is about whether the tools used to rapidly spit out meaningless code will impact one's ability to answer questions about the code that was spat. And even then, I'm not sure the design of the study can answer that question.
I guess this brings me to the study design. I'm struggling a little to figure out how to talk about this. The short version is that I don't think they're testing any of the effects they think they're testing.
So, they start with a warmup coding round, which seems to be mostly to let people become familiar with the tool. That's important, because the tool is commercial software for conducting coding interviews in a browser. They don't say which one, that I've seen.
Then they have two separate toy projects that the subjects should complete. 1 is a non-blocking ticker, using a specific async library. 2 is some async I/O record retrieval with basic error handling, using the same async library.
And then they take a quiz about that async library.
But there's some very important details. The coding portion and quiz are both timed. The subjects were instructed to complete them as fast as possible. And the testing platform did not seem to have code completion or, presumably, any other modern development affordance.
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2. Code Reading. "This skill enables humans to understand and verify AI-written code before deployment."
Again, not in my professional experience. It's just too voluminous and bland. And no one has time for that shit, even if they can make themselves do it. Plus, I haven't found anyone who can properly review slop code, because we can't operate without the assumptions of comprehension, intention, and good faith that simply do not hold in that case.
@jenniferplusplus I agree; LLM-generated code (above a certain threshold of complexity) is like compiled C code with -O2 turned on. Hard to read, very hard to understand.
Code can get “compressed” quite a lot. -
Chapter 4. Methods.
Let's go
First, the task. It's uh. It's basically a shitty whiteboard coding interview. The assignment is to build a couple of demo projects for an async python library. One is a non-blocking ticker. The other is some I/O ("record retrieval", not clear if this is the local filesystem or what, but probably the local fs) with handling for missing files.
Both are implemented in a literal white board coding interview tool. The test group gets an AI chatbot button, and encouragement to use it. The control group doesn't.
/sigh
I just. Come on. If you were serious about this, it would be pocket change to do an actual study
@jenniferplusplus Oh.
I was more thinking of a two week hackathon setting with multiple teams, lots of
, and an evaluation of all different phases like
* planning (choosing right library, based on LLM-“discussions”),
* tests + implementations,
* searching bugs,
* adapting to spontaneous “changes” by the customer,
* readability / maintainability by other teams.But … this …
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I guess this brings me to the study design. I'm struggling a little to figure out how to talk about this. The short version is that I don't think they're testing any of the effects they think they're testing.
So, they start with a warmup coding round, which seems to be mostly to let people become familiar with the tool. That's important, because the tool is commercial software for conducting coding interviews in a browser. They don't say which one, that I've seen.
Then they have two separate toy projects that the subjects should complete. 1 is a non-blocking ticker, using a specific async library. 2 is some async I/O record retrieval with basic error handling, using the same async library.
And then they take a quiz about that async library.
But there's some very important details. The coding portion and quiz are both timed. The subjects were instructed to complete them as fast as possible. And the testing platform did not seem to have code completion or, presumably, any other modern development affordance.
Given all of that, I don't actually think they measured the impact of the code extruding chatbots at all. On anything. What they measured was stress. This is a stress test.
And, to return to their notion of what "code writing" consists of: the control subjects didn't have code completion, and the test subjects did. I know this, because they said so. It came up in their pilot studies. The control group kept running out of time because they struggled with syntax for try/catch, and for string formatting. They only stopped running out of time after the researchers added specific reminders for those 2 things to the project's instructions.
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I just
I'm not actually in the habit of reading academic research papers like this. Is it normal to begin these things by confidently asserting your priors as fact, unsupported by anything in the study?
I suppose I should do the same, because there's no way it's not going to inform my read on this
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io > Is it normal to begin these things by confidently asserting your priors as fact, unsupported by anything in the study?
Not to my knowledge, no.
Summary of the document and hypothesis goes there.
Confident assertion is a maybe in the conclusion (some fields do lend themselves to unambiguous provable assertions) and generally it’s more of a recap of prior analysis.
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@jenniferplusplus
The purpose of a paper is the assumptions it makes.@dalias @jenniferplusplus Only if it's a bad paper.
Especially if it then goes on to debunk those very same assumptions while refusing to remark on it.
This is distinct from presenting a premise as a hypothetical to verify. -
Given all of that, I don't actually think they measured the impact of the code extruding chatbots at all. On anything. What they measured was stress. This is a stress test.
And, to return to their notion of what "code writing" consists of: the control subjects didn't have code completion, and the test subjects did. I know this, because they said so. It came up in their pilot studies. The control group kept running out of time because they struggled with syntax for try/catch, and for string formatting. They only stopped running out of time after the researchers added specific reminders for those 2 things to the project's instructions.
So. The test conditions were weirdly high stress, for no particular reason the study makes clear. Or even acknowledges. The stress was *higher* on the control group. And the control group had to use inferior tooling.
I don't see how this data can be used to support any quantitative conclusion at all.
Qualitatively, I suspect there is some value in the clusters of AI usage patterns they observed. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they talk about this study.
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@jenniferplusplus
…and good struggles, which are what good instructors help createYes, that's one important aspect during teaching/learning. @inthehands @jenniferplusplus
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Given all of that, I don't actually think they measured the impact of the code extruding chatbots at all. On anything. What they measured was stress. This is a stress test.
And, to return to their notion of what "code writing" consists of: the control subjects didn't have code completion, and the test subjects did. I know this, because they said so. It came up in their pilot studies. The control group kept running out of time because they struggled with syntax for try/catch, and for string formatting. They only stopped running out of time after the researchers added specific reminders for those 2 things to the project's instructions.
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So. The test conditions were weirdly high stress, for no particular reason the study makes clear. Or even acknowledges. The stress was *higher* on the control group. And the control group had to use inferior tooling.
I don't see how this data can be used to support any quantitative conclusion at all.
Qualitatively, I suspect there is some value in the clusters of AI usage patterns they observed. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they talk about this study.
And then there's one more detail. I'm not sure how I should be thinking about this, but it feels very relevant. All of the study subjects were recruited through a crowd working platform. That adds a whole extra concern about the subject's standing on the platform. It means that in some sense undertaking this study was their job, and the instruction given in the project brief was not just instruction to a participant in a study, but requirements given to a worker.
I know this kind of thing is not unusual in studies like this. But it feels like a complicating factor that I can't see the edges of.
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@jenniferplusplus
In a bit confusedAren't lower grades worse?
And it even took longer because of "AI distractions"?@realn2s Lower grades are, indeed, worse.
The AI did seem to speed things up, but not enough to achieve statistical significance. And as I describe further down the thread (just now, not suggesting you didn't read far enough), the AI chatbot seems to have been the only supportive tooling that was available. So it's not so much the difference between AI or not, as the difference between support tools or not.
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@jenniferplusplus Kind of a funny statement given that the whole point of abstraction, encapsulation, high level languages, etc. is to provide a formal basis for much of a program to be designed in terms of high level concepts
@jsbarretto That's not what people mean when they say system design.
They mean which way do dependencies flow. What is the scope of responsibility for this thing. How will it communicate with other things. How does the collection of things remain in a consistent state.
For example.
