I spend less review time fixing awkward AI code than I did a year ago. A strong current model can often rewrite another model's clumsy abstraction in one pass. What I still cannot outsource is approval: I will not ask a teammate to approve code neither of us can explain.
Those are different problems. Teams keep bundling them together as “code quality,” then spend expensive review time litigating taste.
The current models I use produce much better code than the ones I used when I copied snippets out of ChatGPT. The older output often needed a human to sand down every rough edge. I would spend longer simplifying its first attempt than I saved by generating it.
That has changed in my workflow. A strong current model can read a messy change from an older model, identify an unnecessary abstraction, and rewrite it into something smaller. I expect the cost of correcting yesterday's AI code to keep falling.
That makes some technical debt less permanent than it used to be. We should change the review standard accordingly.
