Sure. But if you don't own the tool and it is held by a cabal of centralist (even political state-adjacent) parties, you're having a bad day when computer says no.

One of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in principle, something that they couldn’t also offload to ai.

The huge problem in this specific case is that to use this tool well you also need the underlying skill to be developed and preserved. It's very different from a power drill.

The difference if this is okay is how reliable the tool is. If it is a calculator or compiler it is okay. The example in the article also sounds okay (machine learning image classification), though I am not sure.

LLM output is unreliable, so we still need to judge it. If I want to be able to judge code, I must have worked with it to a certain extent. So the unreliable tool does not help me much if I don't want to accept the unreliability.