Anthropic's research proves AI coding tools are secretly making developers worse.

"AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging without delivering significant efficiency gains." -- That's the paper's actual conclusion. 17% score drop learning new libraries with AI. Sub-40% scores when AI wrote everything. 0 measurable speed improvement. → Prompting replaces thinking, not just typing → Comprehension gaps compound — you ship code you can't debug → The productivity illusion hides until something breaks in prod Here's why this changes everything: Speed metrics look fine on a dashboard. Understanding gaps don't show up until a critical failur and when they do the whole team is lost. Forcing AI adoption for "10x output" is a slow-burning technical debt nobody is measuring.