They don't care about maintainability because they're not going to be debugging it at 1am on Friday night but mainly because if something is wrong they have lots of people below them to blame for it.

Developers, however, are still responsible for the code! We must review the AI....all 80k lines of code it generated yesterday. If we don't then we are at fault. And we must go full throttle of course. So ....not be picky and retrograde about accepting what is generated.....

IOW we know who is going to get screwed and it isn't them.

I often have to ask myself if I’m asking for something different because of preference or need. I don’t really know what others are doing but I see this comment a lot about needing to always correct agents. I can’t figure out if it’s an exaggeration or not because once I’ve planned how I want something done I pretty much have zero need to intervene.

> From what I see is it's mainly managers and higher brass who doesn't care about code quality and sustainability, and aims to drive time to market metrics down aggressively with AI.

Trends over time will drive more observable changes. If a whole generation of programmers picks up bad habits that their managers don't care about (think very junior), that will take some time to play out. It's like children's literacy. You don't notice overnight, but a decade of neglect and you have a reading problem in kids.

> Any employee who cares about code quality will become a poor performer with a red luddite label because they dare to change what the AI has emitted for them.

I think that's true but it's a special case. AI is here to stay and with AI coding IS faster and quality is better than ever before. Ideally you want your luddite fired along with the slop generators and keep the ones who are using AI and taking their time to deliver a maintainable code.

> and aims to drive time to market metrics down aggressively with AI.

Go fast and break things has been a mantra for how long?

I think a lot of the laments about "good" code are really about "ownership" - and as someone who spent most of my working career in OTHER peoples code bases I have seen some things. There are a lot of you who think that your code bases are "great" when they are NOT. Personal understanding is not a good measure of quality.

The increased cadence from AI is just speed running to the legacy code base.

The answer: express the concern, and reiterate it after every issue that arises because of increased complexity. Start building a plan on how to "unravel" the mess, how to migrate things in place, how to start drawing boundaries in your systems. The system is designed to reward heroes who fix problems - you want to be super man who stops the bridge from falling apart, not the engineer who pushes the costly fixes it before it does.