Good point: in the AI era, developer "laziness" is a feature not a bug.

Laziness - in this sense - is isomorphic to solving for the path of least resistance, which like the traveling salesman problem or other optimizations is actually really hard. Humans probably use heuristics to get close to lower bound solution which is what "good code" looks like.

Personally, I expect the path of least resistance changes with 2025-era coding agents, and so we'll actually end up changing our metrics for what good code is.