But software was already in a horrible state before AI, so your dichotomy doesn't work.
The status quo with pre-AI Human Written software on a pedestal is that it doesn't work, and it lacks accessibility, polish, performance considerations, UX considerations, tests, and more.
The built-in rigor is trivial to prove. Just put Opus 4.8 in plan mode and tell it to plan something, like a vt100 emulator.
The question isn't whether you can do better than AI, because you'll put your foot on the scale and give yourself infinite time, attention, and energy just so you can say yes. It's whether AI can do as good or better than you with the same time, attention, and energy you would have given a task in the first place.
A couple months back, I had Sonnet build me a browser-based VT-100 terminal emulator. I then had it build me a websocket-to-telnet gateway for connecting some old retro systems to it. Both worked pretty well.
Could I have done it on my own? Yes, eventually. The problem is I would've lost interest and moved on to some other useless project before getting that far.
In practice, you would use an already written implementation, maintained by somebody else. An option that is often ignored by LLM (copy-paste galore).
For example, imagine if textual-serve author would reimplement xterm.js What effect it would make on quality.
LLMs increase technical debt rapidly. It is unclear whether they can deal with the mess they create. But we'll know soon (no need to wait years, to get immovable mess).
The positive side of LLMs is that they confirm experimentally the usefulness of many software engineering practices (testing,docs, adrs, design, formal specs etc)
The status quo with pre-AI Human Written software on a pedestal is that it doesn't work, and it lacks accessibility, polish, performance considerations, UX considerations, tests, and more.
The built-in rigor is trivial to prove. Just put Opus 4.8 in plan mode and tell it to plan something, like a vt100 emulator.
The question isn't whether you can do better than AI, because you'll put your foot on the scale and give yourself infinite time, attention, and energy just so you can say yes. It's whether AI can do as good or better than you with the same time, attention, and energy you would have given a task in the first place.