The Code Quality Crisis Behind AI Development Speed

AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot have transformed development velocity, but their rapid output leaves behind problematic patterns—swallowed errors, unused imports, hardcoded values—termed 'AI slop'. As production systems increasingly run on AI-generated code, this quality debt accumulates silently, making systems harder to maintain and debug. The core challenge isn't that AI writes bad code, but that its optimization for task completion sidelines code quality, forcing engineers to become more vigilant reviewers.