Comment by Nextgrid

I am talking more about the knowledge of the code rather than an objective/subjective measure of code "quality".

Code might be bad by some objective/subjective measure, but if you (or the author) can understand, navigate and work on it, that's often better than good quality code that nobody understands because it was written by an agent, especially under the time pressure of an ongoing incident where you need to fix it now.

Even if the good code is easy to understand, you still need to read it and take it in, something you don't need to do because you got it implicitly by writing said code.

> to know that you're not going to remember it in the long term

From my personal experience, while I will not remember code character by character, a quick look is all it takes to refresh my memory and get the general gist of it and what the context was at the time, something I don't have if I'm reading someone else's (or an agent's) code.