I've been watching chess videos for many years but my own chess playing is just recreational.

Writing/programming as a specialization of just going through the damn thing is actually sacrosanct IMO. Spectatorship as a generalization of reading is second-class. You do become a worse programmer as you move to "higher order thinking", it just matters less in a world where LLMs exist.

> And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.

It does, but less of that thinking translates to skills transferred. What amount of the creativity and magic of Tolkien transferred to his editor? I'm sure it took substantial thinking to edit Tolkien's work.