> Code is code. It either does the job or doesn't.

Surely that is not the only dimension that matters when evaluating software. Maintainability and readability, for example, are crucial for any long-lived project.

In the future, code readability will not really matter, the concept of maintainability will also change: Is it maintainable by AI, if yes, then it's maintainable, we will approach the day where we have virtually ZERO code written by human, so all the tools must be built for AIs, not humans anymore.

Perhaps in the future my grandmother will have wheels… But today radiologists still do radiology (despite AI being better at reading scans), taxi drivers still have work, and truck drivers are still able to put food on the table. It’s still 2026, time traveler, so touch grass…

“Does the job” means all of those things. Figure out what’s important, find a way to measure it (could be also be qualitative.) How does the AI generated code do? If you simply say its no good because of the way it was created, it’s not a rational decision process.

That's a straw man. My argument isn't about 'the way it was created'; it's about the point I clarified in my previous comment. If you want to discuss that, great, but calling my take irrational based on an argument I didn't make doesn't make sense (when your position is “YOLO to AI”). To reiterate — Trust is the core of my argument, and there’s no trust without human ownership and proof of work/understanding yet (possibly ever).

Devils advocate: Are they? Why? If LLM's are capable of taking absolute crap and iterating on it to achieve a purpose, then does readability really matter?