The study looks at junior developers unfamiliar with what they're implementing. Post-hoc they broke down the AI group and grouped some into tutoring->hand coding. Another group was AI maximalist. We should keep in mind the comparison of these groups is very low n. Tutoring + hand coding seemed to have the best speed + understanding. This was all conducted in Jan 2026.

Where I'd push back drawing too many conclusions from this study: arguably most successful AI usage is senior developers that know the programming environment they're working in. Know how far to trust the AI. And carefully review / understand outputs.

Nevertheless, the study's still interesting, and I wish they'd replicate with a much higher n per group. Junior developers (undergrads?) are a more abundant group and not particularly specialized yet. They've also spent years hand-coding at University, but probably could adapt to AI tooling pretty easily.

The study: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...