How is this different from when you join a company and learn your corner of the codebase? In a sufficiently large enough codebase no one had the whole mental model in their head even before AI. What you did was find and ask that one person who knew enough about some part of the project to answer your questions. Now you can ask a model.

I believe institutional knowledge used to work on a ship of Theseus model. It's going to be completely different going forward.

> How is this different from when you join a company and learn your corner of the codebase?

Because most AI generated code is incredibly verbose and noisy. This can be true for any codebase, but it is especially egregious in AI codebases. It is hard to prevent that by just saying "be concise" because knowing exactly where to be concise is the measure of true skill/intelligence.

Every time I have success with AI coding, it is because whatever I need done can work as a pure function, where the probability I have to return to it is very very low.

Making sense of a codebase is like putting together a puzzle. A purely AI generated codebase is like trying to put it together without a picture on the pieces.

This is more like ALL the developers have just joined a company where no other devs work and can pass along institutional knowledge. You know, the thing that makes all that complexity wieldy.