This definition limits the number of problems you can solve this way. It basically means buildup of the technical debt - good enough for throwaway code, unacceptable for long term strategy (growth killer for scale-ups).
>Either way, LLMs are actually high up the quality spectrum
This is not what I saw, it’s certainly not great. But that may depend on stack.
I've found LLMs tend to struggle getting a codebase from 0 to 1. They tend to swap between major approaches somewhat arbitrarily.
In an existing code base, it's very easy to ground them in examples and pattern matching.