LLMs break our ability to conclude when there is proof of effort. We make high schoolers write essays and do math assignments not because we care about essay or because we don’t know the problem set answers, but because the effort trains them in a certain way. We read customized cover letters as an important signal of interest, because it has traditionally been hard to make a good one, and you could only do it for so many jobs you applied for. Gatekeeping is inevitable, and when the old mechanisms stop working, other measures will step in, like relying on the prestige of the candidate’s institution or their connections to decide who to hire, or what papers to cite or publish.