Degrees, certifications, and job titles have functioned as proxies for competence for over a century. The proxies are degrading faster than the replacements are being built.
In a world where a language model can produce work that appears, on first inspection, to be indistinguishable from that of a senior professional, the institutions that once verified quality are struggling to remain relevant.
The response has been predictable: more credentials, more tests, more processes designed to catch what the old signals missed. None of it addresses the underlying problem, which is that verification infrastructure was never designed for a world where generating plausible-looking output is free.