Veteran engineer pushes back on AI code quality rants: human code was never clean either
PoorDecisionMaker-69 · reddit · 2026-09-08
A senior engineer with experience at IT services firms, big financial institutions and startups responds to widespread Reddit complaints about AI-generated code quality (unreadable, duplicated logic, overused comments, cosmetic tests).
- His core argument: he has never seen a truly clean codebase in his career; bad and unmaintainable code existed long before AI and would persist without it
- He believes people either expect too much from these tools or use them poorly (unoptimized workflows, repos, conventions), expecting perfect, standards-compliant output from a single prompt while putting no effort into review and tweaks
- He calls that expectation "extremely delusional" and invites counterarguments
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