AI Coders Were Worst at Debugging in Anthropic's Test: Learn to Fix Your Own Bugs With the Free Vibewise Plugin for Claude
Anthropic tested what AI coding help does to learning: developers who used it scored 17% lower on a quiz about the code they had just used. Vibewise is a free plugin that makes Claude ask how you'd build it first, walk you through the trade-offs and explain what it changed. What the study found, how to install it, prompts to try, and what to know before you rely on it
Vibe coding is fast: you describe what you want, Claude writes it, you ship it. The catch is that you can end up with a working app you could not explain. Anthropic ran an experiment on exactly that, and the result is worth knowing before you build your next thing.
Anthropic gave 52 mostly junior software engineers a Python library they had never used, half with an AI assistant and half by hand. Afterwards everyone took a quiz on the code they had just worked with. The AI group averaged 50% and the hand-coding group 67%: 17% lower, which Anthropic calls nearly two letter grades. Vibewise is a free plugin that tries to give you the other way of using AI back.
What the study found
- 52 mostly junior engineers learned Trio, a Python library for asynchronous programming, with or without an AI assistant, then took a quiz on it.
- The AI group averaged 50% on the quiz and the hand-coding group 67%. That is the 17% gap in the video.
- The largest gap between the two groups was on debugging questions: spotting when code is wrong and why it fails. Anthropic's hypothesis is that the hand coders, who ran into more errors and fixed them on their own, built that skill by doing it.
- The AI group was only about two minutes faster, and Anthropic says that was not statistically significant. So the speed-up was small and the learning cost was large.
- How people used the AI mattered. The groups that scored 65% or higher on average asked it to explain, or asked follow-up questions after it wrote code, or asked only conceptual questions and fixed their own errors.
- The groups that averaged under 40% handed the code writing over entirely, or started with questions and then delegated everything, or used the AI only to debug.
Two honest limits, both from Anthropic's own write-up: the sample is small, and its analysis of those habits does not prove that the habits caused the scores. The study also did not test Vibewise. Treat it as the reason the plugin exists, not as a result for the plugin.
What Vibewise does
Vibewise is a plugin for Claude Code (it also supports Codex) made by a developer on GitHub, nykooi1. It is free and MIT licensed, and it had 3.3K stars when this guide was written (Oct 9 2026). It is not made by Anthropic; its README gives an install line from Anthropic's plugin directory. In the README's words it is for aspiring engineers, junior developers and experienced engineers learning an unfamiliar stack.
Instead of Claude jumping straight to code, a session goes like this:
- Claude asks for your approach first. You reason through the problem with it, in plain English, and you do not need the answer in advance. You can say "skip".
- It helps you weigh the trade-offs and explains any concept you do not know, sometimes with a diagram.
- You review the design and choose Confirm and continue, or Discuss to ask questions first. No code is written yet.
- You review the specific code changes and choose Implement this step. That is the point where Claude is allowed to write.
- After the code, it explains what changed, how the key parts work, why it fits your decision, which tests were added or updated and which checks ran.
The README says these checkpoints are not mandatory stops, and both confirmations offer Discuss. If you only want one thing done without the lesson, say "Just implement this one".
Free, for your email
Get the full setup steps + the copy-paste setup prompt
The rest of this guide (3 more sections, 10 copy-paste prompts) opens right here. The setup prompt, one paste into Claude that sets it all up, comes by email only. Use your real address.
50,000+ follow where these guides come from. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.