What about someone inexperienced but skeptical, using AI to learn + fix their own code before opening the PR?

That's an interesting question ... how should a less experienced developer use AI productively, and learn while developing? Certainly using it as a magic genie and vibe coding something you are in no position to evaluate is not the way to go, nor is that a good way for anyone to use AI if you care about the quality or specifics of the end result!

There's always going to be some overlap, wanting to use a new skill/library in a production system, but maybe in general it's best to think of learning and writing/generating production code as two separate things. AI is great for learning and exploration, but you don't want to be submitting your experiments as PRs!

A good rule of thumb might be can you explain any AI-generated design and code as well as if you had written it yourself? If you don't fully understand it, then you are not in a good position to own it and take responsibility for it (bugs, performance, edge case behavior, ease of debugging, flexibility for future enhancement, etc).