That quote shows an utter disregard for basic human decency.
It is the responsibility of the person running the coding agent to make sure the resulting PRs are high quality. Putting that on your team mates, or worse, random open source project maintainers on the internet, is the definition of an extractive contribution.
> It is the responsibility of the person running the coding agent to make sure the resulting PRs are high quality.
And
> he's proposing a method for how to do so using agents
Are not in agreement. The claim being made is that you shouldn't be sending PRs you haven't personally vetted to be high quality. Definitionally a bot cannot be used to personally vet something.
This is not a contradiction; it's an augmentation. As an operations guy, I can tell you that well-constructed automation to reduce the amount of manual checking a human has to do almost always increases the quality of the overall process's output.
As a software developer, you must never subject your team mates to a PR that you yourself believe to be low quality. The point of code review by others is to catch things that you missed.
There are multiple lines of defense for quality. Yes, automation can and should be one of them, but your own self-review always has to come before review by your team mates.
They are probably reacting to the laughable idea that by making PRs 20% better (or whatever), devs will continue to review the code with sufficient rigor to catch even the bugs they're supposedly now preventing. Assuming such rigor was ever present in their work!
Put another way, who are they supposed to hire to tell these low quality PRs apart from the high quality ones? Who even knows how to do something like that?!