They prefer to work harder and not smarter. Forever hill climbing to nowhere.

I've never worked on a complicated codebase that started out that way until the rest of the business concerns and office politics came into effect. People may not like it, but the bureaucracy is far and away more valuable than the core functionality.

Mature codebases are years of people thinking of all the possible gotchas while solving their acute pain points. This is not fluff, but the living and breathing part of it. Without that code, it's just a machine barely doing stuff in the most obtuse ways possible that nobody wants to pay for.

I would argue that they're putting LLMs to work on that finer detail stuff, but AI is still far too dumb. No, what they're doing is playing with their skinner box.