u/s4shibam

I work at an AI startup, and I directly report to the CTO. He's very technical and uses AI heavily for development. Sometimes he can build an entire feature over a weekend that would probably take a human engineer weeks.

Recently, during a team discussion, he said something that honestly shocked me:

Why should we care so much about clean code, naming, avoiding duplication, etc. when AI is going to read, modify and maintain the code anyway?

His approach is basically: if the feature works, ship it. If something breaks, tell the AI what's wrong and let it fix it.

I understand his point. AI is getting ridiculously good at understanding and modifying large codebases, and the speed difference is huge.

But I'm personally the opposite. I care a lot about code quality, naming, structure, maintainability, linters, formatting, developer experience, etc. Even when I use AI to write code, I spend a lot of time cleaning it up.

So I'm genuinely curious:

Has AI changed how much you care about code quality?

Do you think clean, maintainable code is becoming less important because AI can understand and fix messy code?

Or do you think we're going to regret this approach once the codebase becomes large enough?

Would love to hear how other developers are thinking about this.

I’m about to start earning a six-figure salary per month and want to make sure I manage it properly from the beginning. For people who have been in a similar situation, how did you divide your income between savings, investments, expenses, emergency funds, etc.? Would love some practical advice on what I should focus on at this stage.

I have an upcoming DSA interview for an SDE-1 role at Abnormal Security (Abnormal AI).

If anyone has interviewed there recently, could you share what kind of DSA questions were asked, the difficulty level, or specific topics/data structures that are worth focusing on?

Any insights on the interview format, common patterns, or preparation tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!