for your point a: writing code by hand puts you ahead of the people who don't write code by hand, eg, the people using LLMs to generate code? that doesn't make much sense assuming both of those personas are senior SWEs.

Yes, it's more like the people who agressively vibe-code and had lost interest in learning by doing, and instead are doing by vibecoding. I feel like they are starting to lose their technical ability.

The big AI tech companies are still interviewing people on manual coding tasks and deep understand, which when you're vibe coding a lot, you tend to diverge from those skills, because it's just easier to use AI to "help" you a lot.

You've hit on the problem precisely.

People are vibecoding to do without learning, and that's their problem, but doesn't have to be ours.

They'd still be mindlessly copying and pasting from Stack Overflow without learning if they didn't have AI.

If you have an aversion to reading code and learning from it, human or AI generated, you shouldn't be in this industry.

If you're not using AI to teach yourself new things, you're not holding it right.