You definitely did see a difference between people who just copy pasted from stack overflow, and from people with good fundamentals. The uncomfortable truth though, is that the industry didn't need good coders, it needed a bucket load of basic web apps and it needed bums in seats.

I think the irony of AI is going to be that it will make the remaining software jobs properly hard again, and implementers (ex coders) will be able to succeed with even less code knowledge than before.