The key is what we consider good code. Simon’s list is excellent, but I’d push back on this point:

> it does only what’s needed, in a way that both humans and machines can understand now and maintain in the future

We need to start thinking about what good code is for agents, not just for humans.

For a lot of the code I’m writing I’m not even “vibe coding” anymore. I’m having an agent vibe code for me, managing a bunch of other agents that do the actual coding. I don’t really want to look at the code, just as I wouldn’t want to look at the output of a C compiler the way my dad did in the late ’80s.

Over the last few decades we’ve evolved a taste for what good code looks like. I don’t think that taste is fully transferable to the machines that are going to take over the actual writing and maintaining of the code. We probably want to optimize for them.