the real issue isn't whether AI writes the code -- it's whether you treat the output as a first draft or a final product.

i run multi-pass generation for everything now. first pass gets the structure, second pass refines, third pass i actually read and edit. it's basically a diffusion process for code. one-shotting complex logic with an LLM almost always produces something subtly wrong.

also learned the hard way that using the best frontier model matters way more than clever prompting. paying 10x more for opus over a cheaper model saves me hours of debugging garbage output. the "write-only" framing misses this -- it's not that you never read the code, it's that the reading/editing ratio has flipped.