[delayed]

It's funny that I was just having this discussion with somebody yesterday. I guess it's always a question of degree. An airplane engineer may still not need to know every bit of detail regarding how all of their tools are produced before they can make use of the tools to build an airplane. But I agree that you raised a valid point in that at least they know how the components of an airplane itself fit together. Maybe it would be similar to how software engineers don't necessarily need to know all the details about how a computer is built (even though in some cases this would be beneficial), but if they don't even have the understanding of the actual _software_, building which is literally their job, it might be going too far. Similarly, a car driver doesn't necessarily need to know all the mechanics about a car, but is a software engineer more like a car driver or a car builder? Or indeed, is what we're currently doing with agents akin to wielding tools to build a system, which we still understand on a high level, or driving a black box? There is a balance there which people are still figuring out as everything is still rapidly in flux.

They know the tires are rated for hitting a landing strip under XYZ conditions, they know how to test the tires to ensure they're still confirming to the expectations of that rating, and they're in contact with the trusted organization that's responsible for issuing that rating. Each expert has a comprehensive understanding of their field, and the fields comfortably overlap with no gaps. For any given perspective, there are several people with the complete picture of that perspective.

Contrast this with a vibe-coded "airplane" where nobody actually understands the tires and you're basically operating on a set of assumptions. The tires are not rated and there's no trusted organization. Maybe it works, but you don't actually know. Very different; don't play language games.