Thursday, February 5, 2026
Anthropic recently published research examining how AI use impacts skill development and efficiency:
In a randomized controlled trial, we examined 1) how quickly software developers picked up a new skill (in this case, a Python library) with and without AI assistance; and 2) whether using AI made them less likely to understand the code they’d just written.
And the findings:
We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.
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Sunday, January 12, 2025
Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield argue that the internet is a justification machine. Dan Williams responds that justifications have always been readily available, and thinks that Warzel and Caulfield romanticize past media environments, for their own self-justificatory purposes.1 I think Williams is mostly right, but that both pieces are missing an important component of how changing media environments change how people engage with politics.2
That component is choice: how many entertainment options people have readily accessible to them.
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