That's perfectly wrong. Since strong coding AI, people venture into huge rewrites and other big changes that automatically make sense but otherwise would not.

Yeah it's a bizarre claim. Even better, I've literally taken some of the crappy experimental projects from the pre-Opus 4.6 era, and turned them into real software as models have become smarter.

I would say it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, yes, you can experiment with big changes much more easily, but on the other hand, you can have cruft build up in a big way if you're not actively looking for it and trying to cut it back.

In Debian, often the barrier to change is one or two people actively disagreeing with a change who are in a position to block it through their own action or inaction, so just being able to do more work on the change yourself is not necessarily going to make it easier to change things.