Anthropic dropped a study saying AI makes developers dumber. They tested 52 junior devs — half with AI, half without — and quizzed them on what they built.

The AI group scored 17% worse. Let's dig in.

What the study actually measured

Junior devs were tasked to work as fast as possible in an unfamiliar library knowing a quiz was coming.

Of course they leaned on AI. Of course they didn't internalize anything. That's not learning. That's cramming.

The study measured what happens when you use AI to skip understanding. No surprise: you don't understand.

The real problem isn't AI

Skill atrophy happens when you stop doing the work. Use it or lose it. This isn't new.

Stack Overflow has been doing this for a decade. Copy, paste, ship, forget. AI just made it faster to not learn.

The tool isn't the problem. The intent is.

There's a difference between:

• "Generate this for me" (replacement)
• "Explain this to me while you generate it" (acceleration)

One makes you faster. The other makes you fragile.

The hard truth

If you can't debug AI-generated code, you're not a developer. You're a prompt jockey.

Debugging is where understanding lives. It's the moment you actually have to know what the code does — not what it's supposed to do.

The study's biggest skill gap was debugging. That's not a coincidence. When you outsource the thinking, you lose the ability to catch when the thinking is wrong.

How to not get dumb

Use AI. Seriously — it's a power tool. But use it with intent:

Ask it to explain, not just generate. "Write me a debounce function" teaches you nothing. "Write a debounce function and explain why you're using closures here" — now you're learning.

Review every line like you wrote it. If you can't justify why a line exists, you don't understand the code. And if you don't understand the code, you can't debug the code.

Turn off autocomplete when learning. New library? New language? Suffer a little. The friction is where the learning happens.

Debug manually first. Before you ask AI why something broke, form your own hypothesis. Then verify. That's how you build intuition.

Ship it

AI is a power tool. Use AI to go faster at things you understand. Not to skip the understanding.

The developers who thrive will be the ones who use AI to amplify their skills — not replace them.

Don't be a prompt jockey. Be a developer who prompts.