People saying this are telling on themselves that they have no idea what quality code is. It's not about looking pretty or nice variable names.

Code quality matters to AI just as much as it did to people

Literally 50 years of engineering history and culture cares about whether code is good. There are libraries worth of books about it, not as a means to an app but for its own beauty. Just read “The Elements of Programming Style”, for example.

Do what you want, write apps with AI and don’t review code, it doesn’t impact me. The claim that no one cares about good code is demonstrably false, and that’s all I’m objecting to.

Not true, LLM’s will struggle with badly organized and designed large codebases just the same, though likely with less errors and profanities.

> No one cares about good code. It’s a means to an end.

I do, my coworkers do, my friends do, etc etc.

No code is error free. All code will need a fix of some kind eventually. When it does, it's better that the internals are not a total mess. In the same way that you don't want the insides of your car to be total alien nonsense either.

Good code is a means to the end of the code being error (and vulnerability) free, maintainable and performant.

And if people are not looking it, those people don't care about their customers.

The way you phrase it makes me realize its almost like a GPL contamination. Eg, once you pull in GPL code, your project is infected and can never use a BSD (or other GPL incompatible) license.

Similarly, once you pull in terrible AI slop code, the project becomes unmaintainable by humans and you need to maintain it with AI.

Code that isn't duplicated in 15 places, that doesn't read the whole database to fetch just 1 record, that doesn't do 15 database reads where one would suffice, that uses an optimized algorithm instead of an exponential one recreated badly from scratch... all that is also good code, and is just as important in LLM-slop era.