> Whether that student walks out the door five years later as an independent thinker or a competent prompt engineer is, institutionally speaking, irrelevant.

I think this is a simplification, of course Bob relied on AI but they also used their own brain to think about the problem. Bob is not reducible to "a competent prompt engineer", if you think that just take any person who prompts unrelated to physics and ask them to do Bob's work.

In fact Bob might have a change to cover more mileage on the higher level of work while Alice does the same on the lower level. Which is better? It depends on how AI will evolve.

The article assumes the alternative to AI-assisted work is careful human work. I am not sure careful human work is all that good, or that it will scale well in the future. Better to rely on AI on top of careful human work.

My objection comes from remembering how senior devs review PRs ... "LGTM" .. it's pure vibes. If you are to seriously review a PR you have to run it, test it, check its edge cases, eval its performance - more work than making the PR itself. The entire history of software is littered with bugs that sailed through review because review is performative most of the time.

Anyone remember the verification crisis in science?