The current trend in state-of-art LLM coding agents is giving more output, thinking longer and checking the results more to catch mistakes. Be it an economics inventive to make users burn through their quota or show increase in usage for shareholders, or a market demand of users liking the ability of models to do independent work without intervention or oversight; the result is what the article seem to call the Vibe Tax.
I myself asked Claude code recently to review a somewhat large PR, to see what it would find. I didn't expect much, but also didn't quite realize how the model would interpret my request; I burned $20 in 3 minutes in API usage, as it ran 2 sub-agents which themselves spun up 5 more each. Most sub-agents were manually checking for things clang-tidy would catch without actually calling clang-tidy. This behavior rose as i changed from sonnet/opus 4.6 to 4.8 and now 5.0.
I don't want to run a agent independently in this way; i ask targeted questions about specific things and review the result. But model development is targeted towards a more hands-off "vibe" workflow, because that's where the money and hype is. As a result, i find the models more frustrating, less trustworthy and more costly to my work. (I've even started using haiku more, since it remains to-the-point without steering away from what i ask)
That said, the companies are incentivized to sell you tokens, and therefore to have the models use as many tokens as they think you'll let them get away with for a given task / level of performance.
As if this wasn't bad enough, it also was not smart enough to regenerate the evidence in these contracts as it changed the underlying source code. So it would get in a loop where it would update code -> commit -> 15 minutes later CI would error citing the contracts weren't updated -> it would fix the contracts -> 15 minutes later CI would error because the fix was wrong -> it would fix the fix and commit -> 15 minutes later contracts would fail -> contracts were fixed again and this time maybe 30 minutes later it would pass, maybe it errors again.
This loop could go on all day every day if someone wasn't paying attention because the agent has no concept of time or wasted work. It's an AI livelock of sorts, but it will eventually converge in my experience. It'll just take 10x longer (literally like 20+ hours) than if you just intervene and tell it knock it off, so it feels like lighting money on fire (hence the tax).
That's why I feel like this vibe coding stuff has to actually be monitored, like a Tesla system -- because like a Tesla system it cannot be trusted to not crash into the proverbial code wall.