Unfortunately, I've had a number of people explicitly defend that nothing's going wrong here. Their view is that, if sloppy code is cheap, everyone might as well produce some to illustrate their ideas before having a conversation. I'm skeptical of that position but haven't had much luck in fighting it.

> Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality engineering? That is, are these juniors protected from randoms asking them to circumvent good process, etc?

In my personal experience yes, but I've seen a few teams and heard stories of many more where the juniors are not protected and they just ship regressions and outages all the time now. I think the trend towards AI cost controls will mitigate this, although the impact will of course be uneven as companies behind the curve discover powerful agentic coding for the first time.