But you should still know how to do it regardless. Because of situations like this. That is the point of my comment. If you can't do your job without ChatGPT, you don't have any business working in your field to begin with. Even if it's at a reduced speed, you still need to know how to do your job.
>It's a nice thought, but I can apply this chain of reasoning to no end of technologies without which scientific progress in a given domain would entirely halt.
Not really. To do advanced stuff you have to understand the basics. This goes for almost every field. You can't build the next-level Javascript app without knowing what an if-else does. You can't be a doctor without knowing a little chemistry and biology. Even in a job like construction, you need to be able to do simple math to make sure your measurements are correct.
Saying that advanced tools should be used for things like programming without understanding the basics is a logical fallacy. It's the same argument that managers sometimes use. You know, the "programmers only copy and paste from stack overflow. Why do we pay you so much?" Asking chatGPT for code means nothing if you don't know how to apply it and search for bugs. And to use code from ChatGPT, you need to know how to do your job without it. Otherwise, you will only produce code that, at best, sucks and, at worst, doesn't work.