Software was always a black box to non-coding execs, but quality still mattered to them, at least indirectly via feature velocity, user experience, reliability, and operational cost. That hasn't changed.

We all may end up ignoring the source code most of the time. But for a few years at least, we won't be able to ignore the quality of it, because nobody knows how to use "AI" in a way that has stable high quality over years of changes.