Why AI Code Needs the Same Rigor We Should Have Been Using All Along

Context: This came out of a discussion on "Slop is not necessarily the future". I commented that technical debt from sloppy code shows up too late to fix. someone replied: "Humans also write sloppy code." That's absolutely right, but it got me thinking about what's actually different when AI is involved. The whole "AI writes sloppy code" vs "humans write sloppy code too" thing has been going around, and it keeps bugging me. Not because either side is wrong. It's that both kind of miss what actually goes wrong in practice. I've been using AI to generate code pretty heavily. The problems I keep running into aren't that different from the problems I've caused myself over the years. The difference is speed and volume. But there's something specific that keeps nagging at me: when AI misunderstands what you want, it commits fully to the wrong interpretation. No clarifying questions. Just goes. Two things I keep coming back to: the gap between what you meant and what got built, and the fact t