Why AI makes code quality more important, not less

Short summary

A senior developer argues that AI hasn't made code disposable — it has made code more important than ever, because code is fundamentally communication between programmers, not instructions for machines. As AI models generate more code, the human audience for code (maintenance, verification, modification) becomes the critical bottleneck. The author predicts an era where code quality is severely underappreciated yet remains essential to the industry.

• •Code is communication between programmers, not instructions for machines — machines only care about machine code
• •AI generating code increases the importance of human-readable code for verification and maintenance
• •Author predicts severe underappreciation of code quality even as it remains critical

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.