I've been hit with the team manager trying to clear tickets on the jira board with entirely AI generated code, and what I've observed is they always make the system more complex, usually absurdly complex. The AI code never looks at things from a higher level, or reconsiders the requirements, it just layers on a load of crap until the tests pass.

It does that, yeah. But my experience mostly in codex with gpt 5.5 and 5.6 is that if you micromanage it enough you can get clear code. It just gets really annoying to repeatedly do that.