Isn't that literally how open-source works, and why there's so many Linux distros?
Code quality is a subjective term as well, I feel like everyone dunking on AI coding is a defensive reaction - over time this will become an entirely acceptable concept.
Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their LLMs do some modifications that are completely opaque to the vibe coder.
Perhaps the long term steady state will be a goldilocks renaissance of open source where lots of new ideas and contributors spring up, made capable with AI assistance. But so far what I've seen is the opposite. These people just feed existing work into their LLMs, produce derivative works and never bother to engage with the original authors or community.
I spend time using my agent to better understand existing codebases and their best practices than I'd ever have the time/energy to do before, giving me a broader and more holistic view on whatever I'm changing, before I make a change.
I always find it odd that people say both that vibe coding has obvious and immediate negative consequences in terms of quality and at the same time that nobody could learn or be incentivized to produce better architecture and code quality from vibe coding when they would obviously face those consequences.
This also lines up with the history of automation in many other industries. Modern manufacturing is capable of producing parts that a medieval blacksmith couldn't dream of, for example. Sure, maybe an artisan can produce better code than an llm now, but AI assisted humans will beat them in the near future if they aren't already producing similar quality output at greater speed, and tomorrow's models will fix the bad code written today. The fact that there's even a discussion on automated vs hand written today means that the writing is almost certainly on the wall.