I think there's a potential unstated assumption here, though forgive me if it was made explicit elsewhere and/or I missed it.

LLM-assisted can be with or without code review. The original meaning of "vibe coding" was without, and I absolutely totally agree this rapidly leads to a massive pile of technical debt, having tried this with some left-over credit on a free trial specifically to see what the result would be. Sure, it works, but it's a hell of a mess that will make future development fragile (unless the LLMs improve much faster than I'm expecting) for no good reason.

Before doing that, I used Claude Code the other way, with me doing code reviews to make sure it was still aligned with my ideas of best practices. I'm not going to claim it was perfect, because it did a python backend and web front end for a webcam in one case and simultaneously on a second project a browser-based game engine and example game for that engine and on a third simultaneous project a joke programming language, and I'm not a "real" python dev or "real" web dev or any kind of compiler engineer (last time I touched Yacc before this joke language was 20 years earlier at university). But it produced code I was satisfied I could follow, understand, wasn't terrible, had tests.

I wouldn't let a junior commit blindly without code review and tests because I know what junior code looks like from all the times I've worked with juniors (or gone back to 20 year old projects of my own), but even if I was happy to blindly accept a junior's code, or even if the LLM was senior-quality or lead quality, the reason you're giving here means code review before acceptance is helpful for professional development even when all the devs are at the top of their games.

Yes, but I'm talking about more then code review -- there is a ton of value in discovering all of the ways not to solve a problem. When reading 25 forum posts or whatever in trying to write some function, you're learning more then just the answer. You're picking up a ton of context about how these sorts of problems are solved. If all you're doing is reviewing the output of some code generator, your mental context is not growing in the same way.

Merely choosing lines to copy and paste from one file of your own code to another is a learning experience for your brain. AI is excellent for removing a lot of grunt work, but that type of work also reinforces your brain even if you think you are learning nothing. Something can still be lost even if AI is merely providing templates or scaffolding. The same can be said of using Google to find examples, though. You should try to come up with the correct function name or parameter list yourself in your head before using a search engine or AI. And that is for the moist simple examples, e.g. "SQL table creation example". These should be things we know off the top of our heads, so we should first try to type it out before we go to look for an answer.