> Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course.

What happens in an environment of cheaters is that cheating becomes so commonplace, the competition becomes one that assumes cheats are enabled, and then everyone involved either denies cheating or is silent about it because IYKYK and if you DK, you don't need to K. Look at bodybuilding, which is full of men (and women!) absolutely juiced to the gills getting on Instagram and assuring everyone that their physique is totally natty, bro, just hard work and proper nutrition.

Programming is headed in that direction. LLM use, even to the point of "vibeslop", is the new default, and while LLMs do overindex on benchmarks, our benchmarks are going to end up overindexing on validating whatever public opinion thinks is "great" at the time, irrespective of whether it actually is, so "cheating" as we know it will go undetected, and certainly unpunished if it is detected. I don't know what the equivalent of falsely claiming you're natty is. Maybe saying "I wrote this" when you wrote it about as much as the Pope painted the Sistine Chapel fresco?