If you're an enterprise (including startups), you worry about customers, not code quality. There are famously many startups that gained traction despite shit code and then eventually got around to fixing it, to whatever extent was possible, like Facebook HHVM, Stripe's Sorbet, etc.

Ok, and? You can live with that if there are more important things to deal with.

I've stared at ugly LLM code, that I had just had generated, and worked well enough for my purposes. (generally, some quick recursion into a nested python dictionary in order to dig out some property -- especially for linting or quick data analysis).

And I wanted something better, sure, something a bit more readable ...but I just needed it to work well enough to recurse through a yaml file for config file linting, not be battle-hardened against every test case.

So to deal with the mess, I shoved it in a pure function, threw a few basic sanity unit tests around it, put a comment with a disclaimer of "#this is LLM generated code, it is lightly tested, do not use it for anything truly load-bearing without a lot more tests" and I moved on to something else.

Not everything has to be bulletproof.

I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because I have to ensure the two juniors in my team who are now creating 50x work won’t merge complete garbage, reviewed by another engineer that has already given up on caring.

I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because my Product Manager thinks changing fundamental premises of tasks I already spent two weeks on (mostly removing human blockers) is very simple. After all, when he asked Claude to update his prototype, it only took it 10 minutes.

I can’t turn 10x work into 20x work because the company dedicated entire teams to write company-wide skills for everything. They suck, but if I don’t use them, I’m not following the new “golden path for engineering”, and I lose points in my performance review.

I can, however, turn 10x work into 20x work, or even much more than that, if AI actually did what it’s promising and eliminated most of my team, the product manager, and the middle managers. Or me. I could use a break.

We must then assume you're not getting those 10x gains

Definitely enjoying the lack of eye-rolling, being asked to explain obvious things multiple times, and stopping things being done for resume-stuffing reasons.