Does code quality still matter?

I honestly don't know, but I guess we'll find out. You can't open a social-media feed or listen to a podcast without being bombarded with stories of how LLMs write code faster than programmers. Not only for greenfield development, but also in already-established code bases. As long as you use LLMs as a tool to generate code that humans are ultimately responsible for, the quality of the code still matters. Humans need to review that code, work with it, fix its bugs, etc. But what happens if humans are no longer in the loop? I recently came across this tweet: "What if we let people YOLO the code base without LLMs (coding by hand)? "No? Bad idea? "Then why is it okay with LLMs? Why does agentic code get a pass, but human code doesn't?" Tweet, Tim Ottinger, 7 July 2026 I believe that Tim Ottinger has a slightly different valid point to make, but it comes close enough to something I've been mulling over for a few years: If, in the future, LLMs write all the code, does code quality matter?…