Conflict of interest or not, he's not really wrong. Anyone shipping code in a professional setting doesn't just push to prod after 5 people say LGTM to their vibe coded PR, as much as we like to joke around with it. There are stages of tests and people are responsible for what they submit.

As someone writing lots of research code, I do get caught being careless on occasion since none of it needs to work beyond a proof of concept, but overall being able to just write out a spec and test an idea out in minutes instead of hours or days has probably made a lot of things exist that I'd otherwise never be arsed to bother with. LLMs have improved enough in the past year that I can easily 0-shot lots of ad-hoc visualization stuff or adapters or simple simulations, filters, etc. that work on the first try and with probably fewer bugs than I'd include in the first version myself. Saves me actual days and probably a carpal tunnel operation in the future.

> Anyone shipping code in a professional setting doesn't just push to prod after 5 people say LGTM to their vibe coded PR, as much as we like to joke around with it.

I can guarantee this is happening in a lot of companies right now. Any company where there is pressure to use AI tools + pressure to get faster results it's inevitable.

Sure, there are incompetent people at every company, but if there was ever a solid reason for draconian linter and unit test rules besides middle management power tripping, it's to catch their mistakes. If it still makes it to prod, the CI/CD is not set up properly or operated by some that don't care, in which case the results are the same with AI or without.