Is AI making you a worse developer?

Two 2026 studies say AI-assisted devs score 17% lower and ship 41% more complex code. Here's how to prevent it.

Is AI making developers lazy? Anthropic ran a randomized controlled trial in 2026 to answer that. Their finding: AI-assisted engineers scored 17% lower on code comprehension than engineers who worked manually.

That’s too large to be acceptable.

The code is there. The feature works. The tests pass.

It runs. What else is there to check?

AI tools don’t make developers lazy by force. They create conditions where laziness is the path of least resistance. The assumption that working code is good code.

Working is not the same as correct. Correct is not the same as maintainable. And AI is not in the room when the edge case hits production and someone has to dig in without a mental model of what was built.

I’ve been building software and working with engineering teams at Amazon for years. I know this. I also watch myself do it anyway. Once AI generates code that does what I asked, I don’t want to spend time inside it. The review feels like a chore.

That is exactly where the real bugs live. In the co…