It's pretty easy to generalize this, but it doesn't match my perception. People who are using llms to do things they could have already done, but faster, probably have atrophying skill sets. People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves. The problems are just much bigger.
The average Joe can easily vibe code apps that took a small startup just a few years ago. If developers are also using AI to build the same simple apps - then yeah. They're not pushing themselves hard enough, and probably not using their brains as much anymore.
In a single-level loop, i is just an offset. I agree that depending on the context (maybe even for the vast majority of for loops like you're suggesting) it's probably fine.
But once you nest three deep (as in the example that kicked off this thread), you're defining a coordinate space. Even in a 10-line block, i, j, k forces the reader to manually map those letters back to their axes. If I see grid[j][i][k], is that a bug or a deliberate transposition? I shouldn't have to look at the for clause to find out.
The issue isn't the names themselves, it's the locality of information. In a 3-deep nested loop, i, j, k forces the reader to maintain a mental stack trace of the entire block. If I have to scroll up to the for clause to remember which dimension k refers to, the abstraction has failed.
Meaningful names like row, col, cell transform structural boilerplate into self-documenting logic. ijk may be standard in math-heavy code, but in most production code bases, optimizing for a 'low-context' reader is not an anti-pattern.
The average Joe can easily vibe code apps that took a small startup just a few years ago. If developers are also using AI to build the same simple apps - then yeah. They're not pushing themselves hard enough, and probably not using their brains as much anymore.