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41% of all code shipped in 2025 was AI-generated or AI-assisted. The defect rate on that code is 1.7x higher than human-written code. And a randomized controlled trial found that experienced developers using AI tools were actually 19% slower than developers working without them. Devs have always written slop. The entire software industry is built on infrastructure designed to catch slop before it ships. Code review, linting, type checking, CI/CD pipelines, staging environments. All of it assumes one thing: the person who wrote the code can walk you through what it does when the reviewer asks. That assumption held for 50 years. It broke in about 18 months. When 41% of your codebase was generated by a machine and approved by a human who skimmed it because the tests passed, the review process becomes theater. The reviewer is checking code neither of them wrote. The linter catches syntax, not intent. The tests verify behavior, not understanding. The old slop had an owner. Someone could explain why temp_fix_v3_FINAL existed, what edge case it handled, and what would break if you removed it. The new slop has an approver. Different relationship entirely. Arvid’s right that devs wrote bad code before AI. The part he’s missing: the entire quality infrastructure of software engineering was designed around a world where the author and the debugger were the same person. That world ended last year and nothing has replaced it yet.

aakashgupta ↗