> For these environments, AI coding will just scale up the shit they have, but also allow the small amount of people who might care to deal with this mess and fix it up much much faster than they could before.

I think in these contexts AI has an overall positive effect, because it's a bit like having a competent developer that can solve technical debt, albeit in a narrow form.

So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.

The downside of blindly using AI in software development is that the software becomes poorly defined. AI-generated logic can be arbitrary, and as the codebase grows, more rules and assumptions become unclear.