(When I tried with Zig it was a disaster..)
As the founder of AI2sql, I’ve found that balancing AI assistance with human oversight is crucial. By setting clear guidelines and regularly refactoring the code, it's possible to harness the speed of AI while maintaining a clean and manageable codebase.
Increasing my per-hour rate until I'm comfortable spending hundreds of hours unspaghettifying code.
If they are still looking to have humans maintain the code, and hire people to optimize it, the at use case needs to be taken into account. From that perspective, I would argue that it doesn’t work.
You could/should charge a higher rate for companies that have a bigger mess to clean up. A cleaning crew is going to charge more to clean up a hoard than to do some light cleaning and re-organizing. The price reflects the effort involved, and I don’t see this as any different. They can choose to pay to write clean code up front, or pay for it later with difficult or impossible maintenance. The choice is theirs.
Personally, everyone on my team hates AI and it’s rarely used. I probably use it the most, which is maybe 4 or 5 times a month to write a single line here or there, mostly to save me a search for syntax.