> crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder

Why not? It is subject to the same pressures, in fact it is subject to more time pressure than most corp code out there. Also, it's the model that's doing the coding, not the frontend tool.

No one cares about code quality. No one has ever cared about code quality. It’s only been tolerated in businesses because no one could objectively say that ignoring code quality can result in high velocity. With coding agents, velocity is now extremely high if you get humans out of the way.

Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved.

I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.

The bet is that it will be trivial for them to invest in cleaning up Claude Code whenever they face real competitive pressure to do so. My best guess is that it's a bad bet - I don't think LLM agents have solved any of the fundamental problems that make it hard to convert janky bad code to polished good code. But Claude Code is capable in my experience of producing clean code when appropriately guided, so it's not that there's no choice but jank. They're intentionally underinvesting in code quality right now for the sake of iteration speed.