Software engineering concerns itself with the industrial production of software, at scale. Much like chemical engineering for chemicals. Artisanal handcrafted software is kind of outside the scope of the discipline of software engineering.

AI generation and assistance is such an accelerant to industrial software production that it is now a must for serious software engineering. If you need to evolve your mental model of the code base, ask your LLM. It's at least as good an accelerant of understanding existing code as it is of writing new code—maybe better.