You can do this with really small models but you have to do a more legwork. I wouldn't expect most trivially small models to handle anything more than 1 file reliably. The new qwen 3.6 is different though, I have heard cases where it is behaving close to sonnet.

That said I don't see why people are so scared to touch code even if it saves them 500 euro a month. Using my IDEs find across my repo and auto replacing 2 patterns is trivial to do and way faster to do by hand. I mostly use small models, it prevents a lot of the issues I've seen with large models and vibe/agentic coding medium to long term. I also write a lot of code.