> Unlike their human counterparts who would and escalate a requirements gap to product when necessary, coding assistants are notorious for burying those requirement gaps within hundreds of lines of code

This is the kind of argument that seems true on the surface, but isn't really. An LLM will do what you ask it to do! If you tell it to ask questions and poke holes into your requirements and not jump to code, it will do exactly that, and usually better than a human.

If you then ask it to refactor some code, identify redundancies, put this or that functionality into a reuseable library, it will also do that.

Those critiques of coding assistants are really critiques of "pure vibe coders" who don't know anything and just try to output yet another useless PDF parsing library before they move on to other things.

I hear your pushback, but that I think that's his point:

Even seasoned coders using plan mode are funneled towards "get the code out" when experience shows that the final code is a tiny part of the overall picture.

The entire experience should be reorganized that the code is almost the afterthought, and the requirements, specs, edge cases, tests, etc are the primary part.

It will not in fact always do what you ask it because it lacks any understanding, though the chat interface and prolix nature of LLMs does a good job at hiding that.