> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…
More importantly, I bet none of the companies running with that level of risk are touching Generative AI powered tools with a 30 feet pole. Maybe Boeing.
Many people I know are using GenAI in their day to day professional lives, and loving it. I'm not one of them. I'm a quality freak. While development is not my primary job, I love to write dependable code, which lets me to sleep well at night and forget that it even exists after some point.
But not everyone is enjoying and caring about their job and quality of their work, as long as they get paid and tick boxes. Even in companies where people write millions lines of code touching billions of people's lives (e.g.: Microsoft).
Time to market, retention, engagement, getting that promotion, a new car, meeting KPIs are more important than that pesky thing called quality. Because it slows them down. They are doing something amazing, so they need no permission, and the new amazing thing is "software built with AI in record time with less developers". letter Q in previous sentence stands for quality, if you find one.