In a way, that’s the situation today. You can pay an experienced developer $$$$ to do it right, or you can outsource it and pay $$ but pay extra for more layers of review, have lots of unfixed bugs and more tech debt.
You are proposing that instead we pay the frontier model to clean it up. If it can, I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative. That’s the way the frontier AI companies will extracting the value of the work from you.
But there's two ways this could be true: Frontier models costs rise, or (more likely) experience dev costs fall
As long as the API is private or not dependent on by automated systems and you have good test coverage, you can get away with bad code IMO since you can always refactor. If it looks stupid but it works (and can be refactored/fixed/improved later if needed) it aint stupid.
They already did the bare minimum allocation to both despite engineering screaming at them.
I highly doubt executives are going to accept slower release and sale cycles in order to provide better support.
If anything, I expect this trend to accelerate. I’m imagining the opposite, a plethora of AI slop with increasingly burned-out engineers.
Sales are out of their control.
If there’s a market for quality and you don’t have it, sales are going down no matter what the PHB wants.
If there’s not, watch out for the vibe-coded competitor.