That's what he thinks, surely.

It's clear though. Even if an AI had connected all the dots on the obsolete shorthand, it would never have recognized the human value. I doubt that any AI process would choose to spend the energy on interpreting this particular obsolete handwriting and then understand that it was from the hand of a genius.

But is he needed once he finished writing the prompt?

Using AI to do your job does not mean that AI suddenly walks in the door and escorts you out and starts collecting your paycheck.

Someone is still driving these studies, and probably will be for a while. Or maybe not. But still we can reward this guy for opening up this can of theorems that had before.

Silliest case: Imagine a dusty basement terminal screen open to claude code with "There we go! Cancer is cured as you requested, let me know and I'll send off the results" and nobody is around to approve it.

The professor's value was/is in being one of a few people with the capability of interpreting the shorthand. By translating it with AI, his value as an interpreter begins evaporating as the translated workbooks become accessible to more logicians.

He might see his value in his role of carrying the knowledge itself rather than being its gatekeeper.

And he didn't want to milk that for the rest of his life because he's a smart guy that has other skills and interests

I actually got a very different impression. He could publish this interesting result, exactly because he had been working on this project i.e., had an interest dataset to feed into Claude and had knowledge to interpret its output.

Compare him to someone burning tokens to generate cringeworthy AI slops to share on social media. The value of a tool depends on the skill of the user.