The article explicitly calls out that that’s what they are looking for in a competent software engineer. That incompetent developers exist, and that junior developers tend to not be very competent yet, doesn’t change anything about that. The problem with LLMs is that they’re already the final product of training/learning, not the starting point. The (in)ability of an LLM to form stable mental models is fixed in its architecture, and isn’t anything you can teach them.

I just (re) read the article and the word "competent" doesn't appear in it. It doesn't discuss human developer competency at all, except in comparison to LLMs.