> Markets will not reward slop in coding, in the long-term.

Forgive my cynical take, but we're currently experiencing a market that doesn't appear to be rewarding anything specific in the long-term, as huge sums of money are traded on a minute-to-minute, day-to-day, and week-to-week basis. There's an explosion of uncertainty in today's markets and complete collapse of long-range planning echoing at many levels in society--particularly at the highest levels of governments. So I kind of don't want to hear about markets are going to reward.

But what exactly is "good code" (presumably the opposite of slop)?

I'd say that good code is terse, robust, suits its function, yet admits just the right amount of testability, performance, and customizability for the future. Good code anticipates change well. That means that if it has one job, it does that one job well, and not twenty others. If the job is going to stay the same, the code is going to stay the same. Good systems are made from well-factored pieces of code that have proper jobs and do their proper jobs without taking on jobs they shouldn't.

I for one think that AI code is going to reflect its training. If it's trained on just a random selection of everything out there, it's probably going to be pretty mediocre and full of bugs.

Markets have always rewarded popularity in the short term. in the long term though it has always rewarded quality.