This was the promise of "no code" / "low code" solutions in the past

It has never worked in the past, I'm not entirely convinced that it will work now

Agreed. Trying to live in a high level of abstraction without understanding the components of the system will cause the project to fail after a certain point.

But "utter crap" isn't just an aesthetic issue - that can mean all kinds of bugs and malfunctions!

And infinite job security for those who know how to turn on a debugger

Or people will just throw the product away and buy a replacement because it’s cheaper than fixing it, much like we no longer mend clothes

I think the kind of people, who in the past constructed extremely useful (if brittle) solutions with Excel, will be creating all sorts of AI bespoke and very useful tools.

It won't bother them at all what the code looks like under the hood. Not that the code will look worse that what an "average" developer produces. Claude and ChatGPT both write better code than most of the existing code I usually look at.

Beautifully formatted, exquisitely incorrect code that provides the simulacra of a feature on the happy path and subtly fails in all other scenarios with hard to detect, impossible to debug errors. Can't wait (it's already there to be honest).

Better than poorly formatted code, making basic mistakes like SQL query string concatenation, from someone who didn't bother to write any tests. You just have to treat it like code you got from someone else. It would be hard for AI to produce more magical errors that are harder to debug than what humans write. LLMs are one of the best debugging tools out there too.

Yeah and then you’ll get hundreds of slightly different protocols formats and standards and nothing will talk to each other anymore without bespoke integration

LLMs can do that integration :)