That wasn't what this study was. It was specifically looking at how AI affects learning a new library/tooling. And, yeah, it's not surprising that using AI to blindly generate code winds up not translating into similar skills for writing the code manually. (Also, the comprehension scores were significantly divided between different ways people used the assistant, so this is another study saying that not all AI use is equivalent.)

Note that we require students how to do math longhand as well before allowing them to bring successively more complex calculators into the classroom. We don't say calculators are unconditionally bad because too heavy a reliance on them hinders learning.

Computer science courses are far from being made obsolete through AI. The fact that debugging skills suffered the most from relying on the AI suggests that a solid foundation might even be more important as these tools become a standard part of the toolkit. But that's all that can be gleaned from this study -- trying to say anything based on these results about programmers who are already experienced with the language and libraries being used, is entirely misrepresenting the findings.

re: @[email protected]