Ah yeah, light bulb moment here. I do think the disconnect I sense in reading these comments and discussing this might be in my level of expectations for how good "code quality" has ever been or even really can be in non-trivial applications.

To me, AIs seem to write code with a normal (low) level of quality, but I now have so many more tools to make sure the software works nonetheless, to refactor quickly, and to encode better practices that (mostly) stick in the future.

So to me, this is all a huge net win. But I guess if I'd ever worked on a pristine perfectly engineered system, I might see this all differently.

To me, it's always been a mess, and I'm just ecstatic that I have more ways to manage the mess now.