>I thought that was an interesting idea that I hadn't pushed enough, so I spent a further hour or so prompting around ways to gain confidence, throughout which the AI "fixed" so many things to "improve" the code that I completely lost all confidence in the change because there were clearly things that were needed and things that weren't, and disentangling them was going to be way more work than starting from scratch.

I feel this so much. In my opinion, all of the debate around accepting AI generated stuff can be boiled down to one attribute, which is effort. Personally, I really dislike AI generated videos and blogs for example, and will actively avoid them because I believe I "deserve more effort".

similarly for AI generated PRs, I roll my eyes when I see an AI PR, and I'm quicker to dismiss it as opposed to a human written one. In my opinion, if the maintainers cannot hold the human accountable for the AI generated code, then it shouldn't be accepted. This involves asking questions, and expecting the human to respond.

I don't know if we should gatekeep based on effort or not. Obviously the downside is, you reduce the "features shipped" metric a lot if you expect the human to put in the same amount of effort, or a comparable amount of effort as they would've done otherwise. Despite the downside, I'm still pro gatekeeping based on effort (It doesn't help that most of the people trying to convince otherwise are using the very same low effort methods that they're trying to convince us to accept). But, as in most things, one must keep an open mind.