It's not just about coding standards. It's about, over time, having a team of people with a built-up set of knowledge about how things work and how they're expected to work. You don't get that by vibe coding and reviewing numerous PRs written by other people (or chatbots).

If everyone on your team is doing that, it's not long before huge chunks of your codebase are conceptually like stuff that was written a long time ago by people who left the company. Except those people may have actually known what they were doing. The AI chatbots are generating stuff that seems to plausibly work well enough based on however they were prompted.

There are intangible parts of software development that are difficult to measure but incredibly valuable beyond the code itself.

> Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is the point.

This could be the vibe coder mantra. And it's true on day one. Once you've got reasonably complex software being maintained by one or more teams of developers who all need to be able to fix bugs and add features without breaking things, it's not quite as simple as "make the machine do the thing."