>ai-generated code is throw-away code
Mate, most code I ever written across my career has been throw away code. The only exception being some embedded code that's most likely on the streets to this day. But most of my desktop and web code has been thrown away by now by my previous employers or replaced by someone else's throwaway code.
Most of us aren't building DOOM, the Voyager probe or the Golden Gate bridge here, epic feats of art and engineering designed to last 30-100+ years, we're just plumbers hacking something quickly to hold things together until the music chairs stop playing and I have no issue offloading that to a clanker if I can, so i can focus on the things I enjoy doing. There's no shame in that and no pride in that either, I'm just paid to "put the fries in the bag", that's it. Do you think I grew up dreaming about writing GitHub Actions yaml files for a living?
Oh and BTW, code being throwaway, is the main reason demand and pay for web SW engineers has been so high. In industries where code is one-and-done, pay tends to scale down accordingly since a customer is more than happy to keep using your C app on a Window XP machine down in the warehouse, instead of keep paying you to keep rewriting it every year in a facier framework in the cloud.