AI Assistance Undermines Skill Formation

The real split here is not AI versus no AI, it's atrophy versus foreclosure: if you already know the skill, AI can dull it; if you're still forming it, AI can prevent it from ever solidifying.

• –Randomized experiments found no meaningful average efficiency gain, even though some fully delegated tasks did show productivity improvements.
• –The damage landed in the exact places that matter for oversight: conceptual understanding, reading code, and debugging the model's output.
• –The six interaction patterns are the actionable part of the paper, because they show some AI-assisted workflows can preserve learning if the user stays cognitively engaged.
• –The Psychology Today framing makes the policy lesson sharper: junior workers and students need workflows that scaffold judgment, not replace the reps that build it.