Comment by KronisLV

> Someone at some point had a working mental model of the code and a reputation to protect

This isn’t always true in absolute terms. In many places and projects it’s about doing a good enough job to be able to ship whatever the boss said and getting paid. That might not even involve understanding everything properly either.

Plenty of people view software development as just a stepping stone to management as well.

With reading enough code it becomes apparent that the code quality that AI generates will often be similar or better to human developers, even if the details and design are sometimes demented.