> then code quality just doesn’t really matter so much in the age of AI

Except at scale it really does, because garbage in garbage out. The crappier the code you feed the current models, the worse and more confusing the broken leaky abstractions, the more bugs the AI will generate.

There's a lot of space between web dev and medical equipment. I've never met a user that loved how often their work was lost or how long it took to implement feature requests amid all the ship-it-quick duct tape.

The question is whether it has to be that way. Developers who are against slop don’t believe that the current state of software is the best possible world.