I totally agree - the article misses this point in a very conspicuous way. It suggests that Alice and Bob will both graduate at the same level.

What may well happen instead is that Bob publishes two papers. He then outcompetes Alice based on the insistence that others have on "publish or perish". Alice becomes unemployed and struggles, having been pushed out.

The person who puts the time and effort in doesn't just sit at the same level and they don't both just find decent employment. Competition happens and the authentic learning is considered a waste of time, which leads to real and often life threatening consequences (like being homeless after being unable to find employment).

<< authentic learning is considered a waste of time

This, I think, may be the more interesting bit. Steve Jobs anecdotally did caligraphy in school, which some would consider a waste of time, but Steve credited some of the stylistic choices to.

The question then becomes whether it will become an issue now or later. Having seen some of the output, I have no doubt that a lot can now be built by non-programmers ( including myself; I suppose I belong in the adjacent category ). The building blocks exist and as long as the problem was part of the initial training, odds are, LLM will help you build what you want.

It may not be perfect, safe, or optimized, but it may still be exactly what the user wanted to do. Now, the problems will start when those will, inevitably, move into production at big corps. In a sense, we have seen some interesting results of that in the past few weeks ( including accidental claude code release ).

In a grand scheme of things, not much is changing... except for speed of change. But are we quite ready for this?