Debian - and others - could take the opportunity to raise their standards (not that they were relatively low).

A new technology, AI, greatly reduces costs in software development. When a new technology makes inputs cheaper, there's a choice: Reduce the cost of the product, or keep the cost the same and spend the newly available resources on improving product (or somewhere between those poles). For example, if the cost of chickens goes down, the farmer can buy a lot more chickens and produce a lot more eggs, or they can keep their expenses the same and now afford higher quality chickens or production (free-range!).

In software development, facing this new trade-off, people seem to overwhelmingly choose to produce the same software but far more of it, whether or not anyone wants it.

What if instead we made much higher quality software? Larger projects, at least, haven't wanted more pull requests; they have wanted better code. With the AI handling much of the work, the developer's attention can be applied to more difficult tasks. We absolutely need better software, especially with AI systems finding exploits.