When the code is low-quality, you can’t reason well about it, can’t reason well about what changes to apply and what their effects will be, can’t reason about what the outcome will be when making changes to the context (inputs, environment) the code is run it. Instead everything becomes an experiment on a black box or gray box, whose behavior you can’t well predict in advance.

Engineering is the task of making things behave predictably and reliably. Because software is malleable and rarely “finished”, this applies to changing software as well.

I’m pretty sure that there is more than one divide regarding AI among developers, but one of the dividing lines concerns the predictability and reason-ability of the tools and the code. AI fundamentally lacks these qualities.