I truly don't understand why people think LLMs eliminate the need for mastery, or that they limit thinking. I have a lot more time to think when I use a good harness. It handles the pointless toil and I handle the thinking. I'm just thinking about different things. Instead of trying to coax the correct answers from a search engine, the LLM is doing that for me and parsing the correct output, so I'm not spending hours upon hours wading through detritus. While it's doing that, I'm using that time to think more about the problems I'm solving, the UX, etc.

I'm not sure what to tell you if you think the LLM solves for novel thinking.

The issue is at scale. A tragedy of the commons in a way. I have seen a situation where engineers can't write code by hand if challenged to. Not one. At scale (like the juniors got quizzed as an AI sanity check and couldn't hack it.)