There will always be proficient programmers who can read and write good as good as yourself. I have 0 reason to believe programmers coming out of University today are any less competent than when you came out of University.
Stanford is proctoring now because current day students could no longer be trusted to not cheat. UC professors are asking for SAT to be reinstated because students aren't prepared well and classes had to get dumbed down to be more remedial on these shortcomings they are bringing.
They are absolutely getting worse. Ask a teacher, at any level.
How about the reason he just explained? Do you disagree that relying on AI to make changes without knowing what it's doing makes you a worse programmer? How would it not?
If you don't know what a good or a bad approach to any problem is because you've never actually had to solve it, you can't even know what being a proficient programmer means, so how could you hope to be one?
