If anything, this is evidence that coding elegance has value.

The unexpected part here being that AI brings specks of elegance to a terrible, inelegant codebase.

The sad reality is that if your code is available for free and works most of the time, nothing else matters. I'm not sure I would call it "product success" given that OpenSSL's income is enough to cover, like, one dude in a LCOL country some of the time.

It seems to me that after seeing some of the presentations by the LibreSSL folks that OpenSSL is not evidence of elegant code.

I find it scary TBH that we're on track to have more OpenSSL-level software.

Openssl? Code elegance?

I think they're saying that OpenSSL is NOT elegant, but that it is successful regardless; hence, code elegance is irrelevant to whether a product is successful or not (and thus that horribly ugly LLM-generated code has a shot at becoming successful).