Comment by JeremyNT

What tooling are you using?

I use aider and your description doesn't match my experience, even with a relatively bad-at-coding model (gpt-5). It does actually work and it does generate "good" code - it even matches the style of the existing code.

Prompting is very important, and in an existing code base the success rate is immensely higher if you can hint at a specific implementation - i.e. something a senior who is familiar with the codebase somewhat can do, but a junior may struggle with.

It's important to be clear eyed about where we are here. I think overall I am still faster doing things manually than iterating with aider on an existing code base, but the margin is not very much, and it's only going to get better.

Even though it can do some work a junior could do, it can't ever replace a junior human... because a junior human also goes to meetings, drives discussions, and eventually becomes a senior! But management may not care about that fact.