> I think many software engineers forget they exist to get real things done (in many cases at least) and they are a cost center for most businesses. If your end product is not selling software, very few people actually Doing the Thing(tm) will give a single solitary care about code quality or maintainability when they can just spend 30 minutes and $15 worth of tokens to fix it.

I am suprised to hear people so naive they expect their token usage to stay flat if code quality and maintainability starts falling exponentially?

What if to fix 2 bugs your LLM starts adding 50 new ones? Will you tell your customers in supports channel "sorry software is finished, if we try fixing anything, everything else might break, not worth it". Or "we can probably fix it, but our AI usage will raise so much we need to up the subscription 3 fold, you choose".

The speed at which LLM codes is only comparable to the speed at which they add garbage to your repo. If you stop caring about maintainability, you also stops caring about your AI/LLM related bills and the viability of your project past the PoC stage.