I believe the article exaggerates to make a point. Yes, good engineering can also be assisted with LLM-based agents, but there is a delta.

Good engineering requires that you still pay attention to the result produced by the agent(s).

Bad engineering might skip over that part.

Therefore, via Amdahl's law, LLM-based agents overall provide more acceleration to bad engineering than they do to good engineering.

My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?

Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.

There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.

In particular, the bulk of the substantial text of the order has a pretty clear culture war bend with all the talk about how truthful AI is. This is in large part a fight over the political leaning of AI models.

That's the whole point. They aren't law, and they were (probably) never meant to be so far-reaching, and yet the clear purpose of this Executive Order is to tell the states what laws they can enact. The EO doesn't have the legal power to do that directly, but it clearly outlines the intention to withdraw federal funding from states that refuse to toe the line.