Exactly my thoughts. There are people out there claiming code itself has become disposable, and maintenance and refactoring are cheap now. Which escapes the fact that a. all these are heavily subsidized now and unsustainable in the long run and b. when it comes to critical software and code, it's not really disposable and maintaining a vibe-coded codebase is going to be more costly.

Even before LLMs were a thing, it wasn't this way: rapidly generating code was not the most valuable skill. As you say, it's much more important that the code can be confidently modified and extended, and reused, not just now, but then. In a mature product, the initial writing of the code will be the least of the work; maintenance is much more expensive. Ideally, design decisions should appear only once in the code when this can be achieved, because then there's one place to fix or one place to modify, instead of dependencies on some detail that appear all over the code. It's too easy with auto-generated code to wind up with redundancy and code duplication, resulting in a brittle mess.