As others have elaborated, the problem is empowering them to ship mountains of bad code;
And yeah, many semi-technical M2s or even M1s can't distinguish bad code from good code, or worse bad architecture from good; this is golden time for those who are willing to sacrifice the future for present. Just burnnn'em tokenzzz.
In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster.
I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointlessly nullable model fields, verbose doc comments which describe the implementation instead of the contract. I could go on.
The worst part is, even when "prompted" by bad coders, it works in the end. Even has tests (ostensibly mock-ridden, a pet peeve of mine which always falls on deaf ears). So I cannot reject the PR without being an asshole.
I am no luddite. I make heavy use of AI, with all the skills / AGENTS.md / style guides and clear specs, then review every line of code, prefer testing with minimal mocking. I'd even say with right prompting, it can write better low level code than me (eg: anticipating common error conditions).
But my biggest fear about AI is how it enables normies with little to no understanding of CS principles to produce code faster which looks correct but slowly poisons the codebase.
As others have elaborated, the problem is empowering them to ship mountains of bad code;
And yeah, many semi-technical M2s or even M1s can't distinguish bad code from good code, or worse bad architecture from good; this is golden time for those who are willing to sacrifice the future for present. Just burnnn'em tokenzzz.