Is it true that more experienced / knowledgeable / capable people, if at all, have more of an advantage from it, than juniors?

100% true. The kids using clankers to write code didn’t cut their teeth on all of the subtle code flaws that can creep into your own hand-written code if you didn’t have a good understanding of the problem to begin with. Clankers pick the most pedestrian, mediocre solutions possible if you let them because the vast majority of code that can be scraped for training data is pedestrian and mediocre.

At work, I review what the juniors generated with the clanker and constantly find shitty things they missed (eg. I found they had added a boolean argument to a function and passed it all the way down a very long call chain so they could do a branch somewhere stupid. note that boolean wasn’t used anywhere else). These are also the kind of people that will create single call site private methods in classes that makes it impossible to grok a piece of code without the doorway effect because they cargo culted the idea of DRY. All of this shit is in the training data because most of your software engineers are also on a normal distribution and most of them suck. So yeah, giving kids access to clankers is a recipe for shitloads of re-work and wasted tokens. Kids can’t catch the clanker fuck ups because they’ve never seen them before.