> I cringe at the quality of what it generates.

Besides all the other mentioned points, I think a good remaining less-discussed point is that quality in software has always been in the eye of the beholder. You may very well see the AI output as low quality, I may not, and its not necessarily clear who is right or wrong, because there was always little precedent in objectively evaluating code quality.

This is a long standing issue, and was never resolved before AI happened, and the coming of AI has not really changed things, except that AI is under a magnifying glass obviously. How do we objectively measure the quality of code? There's some general consensus on things, but surprisingly little is true professional agreed upon consensus.

If I can make up a figure, I would guess 95% of software engineering quality rhetoric, and craftmanship advice, is just strongly held opinions.

This is not something I can prove, but if I look at the (still ongoing.....) debates on very basic ideas like clean code, and the reactions from also-great programmers like Carmack, Blow & Muratori, it is clear to me that there is little consensus on even the fundamentals of software design.

If all these people can produce excellent working software while disagreeing on these fundamentals (of quality), it means we do not yet understand what the fundamentals are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativist_fallacy