The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
SkillMD.ai - Discover & Create Agent Skills
The open directory for agent skills. Discover, create, and share SKILL.md files for AI coding assistants.
Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI
How to use AI coding assistants without letting your hard-earned engineering skills wither away.
Agent Skills
AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skill...
DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities
A Claude or Codex skill for deliberate skill development during AI-assisted coding
AI’s Next Chapter Requires Human Expertise
The future of AI doesn’t just require technical skills; it demands deep human expertise, writes Annie K. Lamar.
AI is getting too advanced
How AI Impacts Skill Formation
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.
How AI Impacts Skill Formation
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.
My 'Grill Me' Skill Went Viral
Learn the "Grill Me" AI skill—a powerful technique to deeply explore coding plans, requirements, and ideas through structured AI conversations.
Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
A field guide and why we need to rethink our expectations
Agentic Coding is a Trap | Lars Faye
Remaining vigilant about cognitive debt and atrophy.
Another valuable AI tool to address the massive de-skilling event we are currently experiencing! By @lav.io
Sam Lavigne
I made a chrome extension that makes LLMs appear to run very slowly... slowllm.lav.io
