How people learn to program9 min read

Studying the Effect of AI Code Generators on Supporting Novice Learners in Introductory Programming

Majeed Kazemitabaar, Justin Chow, Carl Ka To Ma, Barbara J. Ericson, David Weintrop, Tovi Grossman · 2023 · CHI '23 · Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

A controlled experiment with 69 beginners: access to an AI code generator raised how much they got done without measurably hurting what they retained a week later.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1145/3544548.3580919 ↗

The short version

→69 novices aged 10–17 worked through 45 Python tasks; half had access to Codex, half did not.
→The Codex group completed 1.15x more code-authoring tasks and scored 1.8x higher on them.
→On manual code-modification tasks — done by everyone, without AI — the Codex group did not do worse.
→One week later, retention post-test scores slightly favoured the Codex group but not significantly. The honest headline is 'no measured harm', not 'proven benefit'.

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