Do developers genuinely believe they produce better code than they do under scrutiny - a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Psychologically, this would make sense, given the perceived intellectual demands of coding, which may foster a strong sense of competence and personal affinity with the craft.
If we reflect on the vast majority of lines of code created by developers today, would we not find rather mundane RESTful APIs, CRUD functions, form validations, or CSS wranglings, repeated ad nauseum, rather than novel, new or groundbreaking in the way that say, Hoare's QuickSort or various Traveling Salesman solutions were?
Code created by generative AI seems to elicit a similar reaction in developers when asked to take ownership of another developer’s work. Work they invariably describe as poor, usually with comments like "I wouldn't have written in like that!", followed by moves to push for refactoring, realigning it with their own world view (until the next handoff).
Is it not true, therefore, that generative code is quantifiably and qualitativly as good as human code at this point (as verified in numerous benchmarks, including the non-techbro-hype benchmarks) Perhaps our new problem is not in code generation at all, but the intellectual atrophy it creates on the other side of the AI output splurge machine.