Does Code Quality Still Matter When AI Writes It?

The hottest take on LinkedIn right now is that coding was never the bottleneck. Josh and Bob have hired hundreds of developers, sat through the "why is this taking so long" meetings, and lived through waterfall, so they're calling it: coding was slow, expensive, and scary, and pretending otherwise rewrites history.

But that's just the opening argument. The real conversation is about what happens after the bottleneck moves. Bob walks through the waterfall phases most of the audience never lived through (the 3-inch binder on the shelf, the Gantt charts, the near-infinite bug triage loop) and admits there's something from that era worth keeping. Josh shares a debate he's having with himself about whether code readability still matters when neither he nor his cofounder will ever read the code again, and traces it back to the day he argued his boss out of Hungarian notation because IntelliSense had made it pointless.

From there: the "ilities" and which one AI still struggles with most (Josh's answer is usability, by a wide margin), Bob's claim that the industry has been producing less skilled engineers for 25 years and AI just turned up the volume, a CTO who replaced a 9-year-old website in 3 months instead of a year, and why "AI plus HI" only works if the human intelligence part is still growing.

If you're an engineering leader deciding which standards to enforce on AI-generated code and which ones to retire, this is the episode.

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