Most people probably think the text editor used would have no meaningful effect on the code written.

I don't think many would say the same for LLMs.

Maybe vibe bun is just as good or better than old bun, but how would we know at this point?

> ...we couldn’t have known if the author of a piece of software was proceeding with rigor...we didn’t judge someone’s software by inspecting their methodology...

That's not true. First, some people do directly check whether a project has a level of rigor they are comfortable with before adopting it (or when deciding whether to continue using it). I personally do it, where it matters. Many more use reputation signals, which, while certainly not perfect, correlate, may be good enough, and are a lot easier than direct, manual reviews.