We will look back on this era as one of transition. AI is in its "look monkey can do tricks how cute" era - but it won't be long. For instance the era of "whoa"

We will look back on this era as one of transition. AI is in its "look monkey can do tricks how cute" era - but it won't be long. For instance the era of "whoa" is happening right now in mathematics (Anthropic researchers are pushing math's frontier with little more than the prompt "you can do it" - ie. brute force), and in coding agents we're crossing over - look into leading-edge benchmarks like SlopCodeBench that are pushing labs to RL for long term codebase health and not just problem-solving. The reason I say coding agents will go in this direction is labs are competing to have the most appealing models and so seeking out new unsaturated benchmarks they can hill-climb and show flashy results from, demonstrate to customers they're the best and deserve spend. What these cognitive tools do is make the mundane work we're lamenting the loss of redundant. Who cares if junior devs can't code? When this stuff really gets going they'll be using their answer boxes to both code AND to have have design discussions with a form of intelligence that has every PhD ever obtained and infinite patience. Consider: long division used to be in school curricula; our forebears had to know it to be considered "educated"; and yet I, in my 40s, was never taught long division. Where did it go?