There's an opportunity-cost here. I use agents to be more productive. As many have noted, "Good Code" doesn't rank highly compared to actually shipping a product.

The tragedy, for me, is that the bar has been lowered. What I consider to be "good enough" has gone down simply because I'm not the one writing the code itself, and feel less attachment to it, as it were.

This. There’s no limitation to your prompting. If you feed rules and patterns for clean code to a bunch of agents they’ll happily work on that level.

Just right now no one cares enough yet. Give it a year or two.

I could conceive something evolving on a different abstraction layer - say, clean requirements and tests, written to standard, enhanced with “common sense”