I have seen code bases that are amazing. I have seen ones that look bad, but work. About a year and half ago I saw my first fairly large scale fully AI generated project and it filled me with dread. It looked like the figma, which is very impressive. But under the hood it was bizarre. It was like those sci-fi movie tropes of teleportation where one of the people teleport and the destination coordinates are wrong and the merge with a tree or rock or whatever. There was so much unused junk that had nothing to do with anything. Ugh. My task to was to figure out why the initial render took so long. (unsurprisingly it was loading all the data then rendering, so with toy dev loads it was fine, in production nightmare and getting worse). So I just got to it and made some progress. But the new grad (who thought I was a dinosaur (might be right)) who made it was working in parallel and reintroducing more slop. So it became this Sisyphean task where I am speeding things up (true dinosaur so measuring things) and they were cutting and pasting and erasing the gains.

I have always found management to be just silly exercise in day full of meetings. I like to make things. I could retrain, but, the salary drop would be very hard. Hope to find one last gig and have enough to retire. I still get that spark of joy when all the tests pass.