[brhsagain]

Sure, but in our present reality those tests and interviews are how we currently gatekeep upper middle class jobs, so it is at least of some practical interest.

Also, I think this is a bit overstated. Programmers (and smart people in general) like to think that their real job is high level system design or something, and that "mere regurgitation" is somehow the work of lesser craftsmen. When in reality what GPT shows is that high-dimensional regurgitation actually gets you a good fraction of the way down the road of understanding (or at least prediction). If there is a "buried lede" here it's that human intelligence is less impressive than we think.