I've not found it to be bad for smaller things, but I've found once you start iterating on it quickly devolves into absolute nonsense like what you talked about.

> If it did save me time, would I want that going into my codebase?

Depends - and that's the judgement call. I've managed outsourcers in the pre-LLM days who if you leave them unattended will spew out unimaginable amounts of pure and utter garbage that is just as bad as looping an AI agent with "that's great, please make it more verbose and add more design patterns". I don't use it for anything that I don't want to, but for so many things that just require you to write some code that is just getting in the way of solving the problem you want to solve it's been a boon for me.