Interestingly, I have personally felt this way about projects in which I was involved in the past(written both by me and by others)…

sometimes starting from scratch just faster and/or easier.

>just throw the code away and rebuild it

What about all the undocumented "adjustments" ("bug fixes" in a professional context) that were made to make it actually useful?

> This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".

nah, it reflects on how applications built by humans usually do become spaghetti messes with all the resulting brittleness and unintended negative side effects of changes that result

but it probably doesn't matter for a little toy piano app

Reminds me of Niven/Pournelle's "The Mote in God’s Eye" where the aliens have a very pragmatic/Jury-rigged approach to technology and everything is more or less improvised.

I have noticed this with co-workers also, when you have the ability to read/write/understand things very quickly, you tend to spend much less time on making things tidy, clear and maintainable.

errors compound

Eh, not really. It's the same issue with porting. You always rely on features you didn't properly articulate.

Good luck to future models figuring out which weird section of code are bugs and which are features.

And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity.

Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year.

When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing.

In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes"

That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)

AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.