> I think a strong understanding of the fundamentals of coding are still wildly important to get good quality code

I don't think this is true any more; you need to ask the agent to inspect the system, draw up plans with the system's current shape in mind, then after it's done writing the code, ask for it to review the code, and make sure it's as minimal and high quality as possible a couple of times.

Creating programs really doesn't need deep understanding of the fundamentals any more. It needs a shallow understanding, and a willingness to manually test a lot.