There's no shortage of examples of unmaintainable spaghetti AI code, Claude Code is just one of many. If you have examples of good codebases maintained by "prompting experts", I'd love to see them.
Recent notable examples would be the Linux kernel or cURL.
I can absolutely prompt AI to following established patterns and produce nice, clean output in a legacy codebase. I also have a completely separate set of skill files that I’ve been building organically by allowing the agent to do make most decisions about conventions. The latter produces code that would be a nightmare to modify by hand, but I’m still able to iterate on it many times faster than I could in the codebase where code quality is a requirement.
“Code quality” is mostly “human readability”, and I’m simply not sure that’s a valuable attribute anymore.
That's an extremely narrow view of programming, and shows a complete lack of experience.