I replied to this partially but want to elaborate on the larger point.
The argument you’re making is self-defeating in a specific way: you use introspection skepticism as the weapon (humans rationalize, so self-reports about AI helping are suspect) and then your evidence is entirely your own introspection, i.e. you cannot think of a great engineer using Claude who impresses you. If the mechanism is real then it applies just as much to the skeptic watching their craft get automated as it does to the enthusiast. You don’t get to deploy it in one direction.
Second, you characterize the freed capacity as fake work. You call it “galaxy brain concepts” and “drawing boxes in Figma”. But the work hasn’t vanished, it has simply moved. Someone who uses Claude well does their thinking in the planning conversations rather than the diff reviews. The mental model of the system gets built up-front by directing rather than back-loaded by inspecting. It is not much different than reading an engineering design document written by a coworker and doing review/feedback cycles until your own understanding of what will get built is rock solid. That is how system knowledge gets spread in every team I’ve worked in and it works very well so long as everyone is doing their due diligence (which one absolutely must with AI in order to get good results).
Lastly, I will say this: the meta-pattern of “real programmers don’t need X” has been deployed at every stage of our field’s history, usually by senior practitioners. It has been deployed against compilers, garbage collection, IDEs, autocomplete, Stack Overflow, type systems, auto-formatters. In every wave, the skeptics were partly right about skill atrophy but decisively wrong about the net effect. Incidentally, this is why Linus Torvalds recently likened the productivity benefits of AI to those of compilers: he himself has been using AI more and more and says he wished people treated it like any other tool.
And is Simon not paid to write his blog? It’s highly possibly I’m just taking to heart hearsay that I hoped to be true 
But… but… but… Steve Yegge is paid by AI! So there! lol.
