> , people and companies come to depend on it, and then the mess must eventually be cleaned up.
I have found time and again that enough technological advancement will make previously difficult things easy that when it's time to clean up the old stuff, it's not such a huge issue. Especially so if you do not need to keep a history of everything and can start fresh. This probably would not fly in a huge corp but it's fine for small/medium businesses. After all, whole companies disappear and somehow we live on.
Take your photos example. Sure, the number of photos taken has exploded, but who cares if there are now reams and reams of crappy vacation photos - it's not like anyone is really forced to look at it.
With AI-generated code, I think it's actually awesome for small, individual projects. And in capable hands, they can be a fantastic productivity enhancer in the enterprise. But my heart bleeds for the poor sap who is going to eventually have to debug and clean up the mountains of AI code being checked in by folks with a few months/years of experience.