AI is breaking our proxies for expertise
The signals we used to judge competence — clean code, fast output — no longer carry information.
The signals we quietly relied on to judge competence, like clean code, confident writing, and fast turnaround, used to be expensive enough that they carried information; now they are cheap and they carry none. What I keep thinking about is that we have not yet replaced them, so hiring and review are running on instruments that stopped working.