AI Use May Speed Code Generation, But Developers' Skills Suffer
Infoworld, Friday, January 30th, 2026
As companies move to more AI code writing, humans may not have the necessary skills to validate and debug the AI-written code if their skill formation was inhibited by using AI in the first place, researchers find.
There's a lot of hype about AI coding tools and the gains developers are seeing when it comes to speed and accuracy. But are developers also offloading some of their thinking to AI when they use them as copilots?
Anthropic researchers recently put this to the test, examining how quickly software developers picked up a new skill (learning a new Python library) with and without AI assistance, and, more importantly, determining whether using AI made them less likely to actually understand the code they'd just written.