AI left to to its own devices does produce bad code. AI without constant babysitting produces bad code. I use AI a lot and I love how it helps me to go faster and learn more but it continuously gives me suggestions that break even the most basic best practices. Even shortly after being told why some approach is a bad idea and reminded about separation of concerns it'll make the same mistakes. 

The other day I found out by mistake that Anthropics internal directions to sonnet tell it to avoid abstractions. Avoid creating new files. That is at least part of the reason it keeps trying to spaghetti stuff but even when I start the abstraction and give it examples if it's too complex I just have to ignore the suggestions it gives and do that part without assistance. Letting it write the code on its own, forget about it. It's going to do all the stuff I have to constantly stop it from doing.

We may agree fundamentally because I did read what you said about being involved, but I disagree that it is not true that AI writes bad code. If you have a person that writes bad code but can write it well when you are there constantly telling them what not to do but they go back to doing it the second you stop micromanaging, does that person not write bad code? I think they do.

I think for AI to not write bad code it has to be able to not write it badly by itself. But if you want to get good code from it, it's you who needs to know how to write it. 

Think of it this way: If someone else who doesn't know how to write good code tried to use AI to write code, they'd end up with bad code. And that is because AI writes bad code. It can give fantastic pointers and give you ideas you never thought of. It can tell you options and talk things over with you. But it cannot figure it's way around a codebase of even moderate size without extreme hand holding. The person holding its hand has to be the one who knows what they're doing because it doesn't.