I've been budgeting myself explicit "slop removal" time. In fact I'm in it right now one window to my right here.

I still get a big win from AI on the net, but you do need to budget some time to clean up. I'm still on team "read every line".

In fact this is a case where I deliberately deferred some review because I was a blocker for another team. Now that I've got something to them I'm going back and I'm going to eat a bigger chunk of debt than I normally would, but it's worth it for unblocking the other team sooner. AI has made tech debt easier to take out, in all senses of that term.

It is also pretty decent, in my experience, at being guided into how to fix tech debt. Some other people's experience varies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035455 YMMV.

It's totally worth doing. Especially since it only takes one or two manual improvements before you can just say "ok, replicate this new pattern throughout the codebase. Go."

Out of the box, this is what I've found too.

I've had some luck while refactoring by helping it shape how to refactor, which can improve how well factored code should look like.

Providing examples of well factored code can go a long way, even if it's an open source repo of what to do / not to do.