> good at using coding agents is reading and understanding code.

You can understand the code using an agent; it's much faster than reading the code.

I think the argument the author is making is that: given this magic oracle that make code, how we so contain and control it.

This is about abstractions and invariants and those will remain important.

I think there's some value in pure vibe coding. To your point though, the best way to extract that value is to know intimately at which point the agents tend to break down in quality, which you can only do if you read a lot of their output. But once you reach that level, you can gain a lot by "one-shotting" tasks that you know are within their capacity, and isolating the result from the rest of your project.

I thought "vibe coding" had come to mean "I used an LLM to generate this code", but didn't really imply we'd given up trying to review and read the output. The author is taking it one-step further by suggesting we not bother with the latter.