What is the quality of software that AI writes?

AI-powered coding agents increase productivity for many developers. But do these agents produce good-quality code? Some say this doesn’t matter, we are heading toward dark software factories with source code never inspected, and maybe we should eliminate source code altogether—“source code is the new assembly code”. Others have a different view. Humans sometimes need to debug source code. Source code may need to be audited by humans for compliance. Code should be clear enough for a human to inspect and reason about the algorithms and behavior. Also, good code quality can make the code more legible to agents and reduce unnecessary context. Developer teams can have many different ideas of what constitutes high-quality software and good coding style. Though there are many valid ways to write code, there is also wide consensus on general principles of code quality. For example, avoiding very large single functions or modules, avoiding code duplication, avoiding undisciplined feature creep…