Every week, a new article appears on Dev.to or Zenn arguing about code quality in the AI era. "AI-generated code is hard to read." "Premature optimization creates comprehension debt." "Clean code matters more now, not less." These are thoughtful arguments. I've read them carefully. But I think they're all built on an assumption nobody is questioning: That code will remain the default layer where human judgment operates. We've Seen This Movie Before When factories replaced craftsmen, people debated how to preserve the craftsman's eye. How do you maintain quality when a single worker can no longer inspect every piece? The answer wasn't to slow down the factory. It was to stop inspecting individual outputs entirely. GE's Six Sigma didn't work by making each product more readable to human inspectors. It worked by shifting the object of control from the product to the process. Statistical process control replaced individual inspection.…