No previous force multipliers have lifted the "lazy but smart" over the "smart and NOT lazy". That's not how lazy works, or how taste/expectations work. The "smart and NOT lazy" will evolve their preferences, perspectives, and point of view over time much faster than the "smart and lazy" will so even if they have these agents doing all their work for them, the people motivated to introspect much more on that work will be the ones driving the trends and leading the edge of creative production.

It's like conventions in art: you could make Casablanca much more easily today than in 1942. But if you made it today it would be seen as lazy and cliche and simplistic, because it's already been copied by so many other people. If you make something today, it needs to take into account that everyone has already seen Casablanca + nearly 85 additional years of movies and build on top of that to do something interesting that will surprise the viewer (or at least meet their modern expectations). "The best created human works" changes over time; in your proposed world, it will change even faster, and so you'll have to pay even more attention to keep up.

So if you're content to let your AI buddy cruise along making shit for you while you just put in 1 hour a day of direction, and someone else with about equal natural spark is hacking on it for 10 hours a day—watching what everyone else is making, paying much more active attention to trends, digging in and researching obscure emerging stuff—then that second person is going to leave you in the dust.

> Those are the people I mention at the end, those that clear the bar into being uniquely special. From what I hear from my friends that have been teaching for about twenty years now, you're lucky if you get more than one or two of those every ten years.

Again, it's a false dichotomy. What you described was just "super super smart", not what I suggested as "smart + hard worker: "In that world, the only people who can hope to distinguish themselves are those with the type of specific intelligence and insight that is rarely seen; if you ask a teacher, they will recant the handful of students over their career that clear that bar. Most of us aren't across that bar, less than 1% of people can be by definition, so of course everyone emotionally rejects that reality. No one wants their significance erased." That's not hard work + smart, that's "generationally smart genius." And that set is much smaller than the set I'm talking about. It's very easy to coast on "gifted but lazy" to perpetually be a big-fish-in-a-small-pond school-wise. But there are ponds out there full of people who do both. Twenty or thirty years ago this was the difference between a 1540 SAT score, As/Bs in high school, and going to a very good school and 1540 SAT score, A's in high school with a shitload of AP courses, and significant positions in extracurricular activities, and going to MIT. I don't know what it looks like for kids today - parents have cargo-culted all the extracurriculars so that it now reflects their drive more than the kids' - but those kids who left the pack behind to go to the elite institutions were grinders AND gifted.

What does it mean to even say "having just one of them"? I think the false dichotomy just torpedoes the ability to predict the effect of new tools at all. There's already a world of difference between the janitor who couldn't learn how to read but does his best to show up and clean the place as well as he can every day and the middle manager engineer with population-median math or engineering abilities but a 12-hour-day work ethic that has let him climb the ladder a bit. And the effect of these AI tools we're considering here is going to be MUCH larger on one than the other - it's gonna be worse here for the smarter one, until the AI's are shoveling crap around with human-level dexterity. (Who knows, maybe that's next.)

Anyone you'd interact with in a job in a HN-adjacent field has already cleared several bars of "not actually that lazy in the big picture" to avoid flunking out of high school, college, or quitting their office job to bum around... and so at that point there's not that same black-and-white "it'll help you but hurt you" shortcut classification.

EDIT: here's a scenario where it'll be harder to be lazy as a software engineer already, not even in the "super AI" future: in the recent past, if you were quicker than your coworkers and lazy, you could fuck around for 3 hours than knock something out in 1 hour and look just as productive, or more, than many of your coworkers. If everyone knows - even your boss - that it actually should only take 45 minutes of prompting then reviewing code from the model, and can trivially check that in the background themselves if they get suspicious, then you might be in trouble.