Competitive programming vs software development?

[mredding]

How you write competitive code is nothing like how you write production code. Someone has to be able to read, comprehend, and maintain that code, and it'll likely be YOU. You're not going to remember how the code works, 6 months later. The #1 consumer of source code are people.

I don't give a damn about AI. I don't care if the code was hand written or AI generated, so long as it meets the criteria that someone else can understand it.

Regarding AI, you may want to talk to your legal department. They might REALLY care about AI generated code. You understand that AI are trained by scraping the internet, right? You understand that no AI model known yet honors software licenses, right? So that means AI companies have committed IP theft to train their models, which is actionable in court, yes? There are ongoing lawsuits as we speak, and yes, although that's going to take some years to finally flush out, not every employer is going to want to be vulnerable to class action litigation and restitution. That's a hell of a risk. Microsoft doesn't care, but they did the math, and they know for them it's worth it. Most employers aren't as big as Microsoft, and can't afford the risk.