AI Code Works But Breaks Readability — Style Enforcement Is the Real Fix

AI coding assistants can generate functional code within seconds, but the output often accumulates structural problems over time as functions absorb multiple responsibilities through successive prompts. Generated code also suffers from inconsistent naming conventions and near-duplicate helper functions that no linter flags, since each generation lacks awareness of what already exists elsewhere in the codebase. Different files end up using conflicting coding patterns, forcing developers to re-learn local conventions every time they navigate to a new file. The root cause is not poor code quality in the traditional sense, but the absence of a style contract that binds AI output to a team's established conventions. Experts argue that readability enforcement should shift from prompt-level guidance — which is hard to scale — to automated checks enforced at the commit stage, independent of whether a human or an AI wrote the code.