I think it’s much more simple than that. It comes down to caring.

I’ve had a long discussion with a coworker on a long drive.

What we came to realize is the difference in our attitude towards writing code.

I approach it as craft. Even when I’m doing 100% of my coding with an agent these days. I still care about the result to be of high quality and maintainability. I still use my system design knowledge to guide the agent to produce scalable systems.

He treats it like just a job. If it’s good enough he ships. The edge cases and bugs don’t matter. Can be fixed later.

But in my mind that’s a fallacy. We all know things don’t get fixed later unless they are obvious defects and users complain.

Instead we get slow degradation of overall quality. All those small issues compound overtime to create a brittle systems that is difficult to debug and maintain.

My mental model of software engineering is like this. Each commit/PR is a small LEGO block. If you make them well they’ll snap well and create a stable structure that can withstand forces. If every LEGO block you make is just slightly off here and there. Your structure becomes unstable and will always have faults and will always have failures under unpredictable environmental pressures.