The speed benefit of AI coding assistants is well-established. Whether they improve your actual skill as a developer is a more nuanced question, and the answer depends on your habits.
They accelerate learning if you read the suggestions
Reading and understanding AI-suggested code, rather than blindly accepting it, exposes you to patterns and approaches you might not have known — genuinely educational if you engage with it.
They can create shallow understanding if you don't
Accepting suggestions without understanding them produces code that works but that you couldn't have written or debugged yourself — a real risk, especially for beginners.
They're strongest for boilerplate, weakest for architecture
AI assistants excel at repetitive, well-patterned code. They're much less reliable for the higher-level design decisions that separate a good developer from an average one.
The honest recommendation
Use them, but treat every accepted suggestion as something to briefly understand, not just accept. That habit is the difference between the tool accelerating your growth and quietly stalling it.