> What I've found is that AI allows lazy and incompetent developers to be more lazy and more incompetent. This then has the effect that product quality suffers more, faster.

Yeah. To me it seems very much like the "use dynamic typing for everything" fad. You had a bunch of junior and/or incompetent developers who went around insisting that type declarations are bad, static typing slows down development, you just code so much faster if everything is dynamically typed. And in the context of a new project, they were totally right. It took a few years for the debt to finally catch up, and people realized that these massive, untyped monoliths they had were unmaintainable. Now the two biggest dynamic languages (Python/JavaScript) are effectively typed languages, because nobody uses their untyped variants for serious work.

Dynamic typing still has great uses -- interactive data exploration, putting together quick scripts (though less relevant with AI...), or even just simple prototypes -- but what we tried to do with it at the start, as an industry, was clearly dumb as hell. I suspect we'll look back in 5-10 years and realize that with some of the stuff we're doing with AI, too. It's already happened with things like Gastown.