> their mistakes aren't based on their understanding, it's basically random guesses

Whilst I don't claim any true "understanding" as that is a very loaded term that doesn't mean it's just random guesses.

Anyone using recent LLM coding agents on a regular basis would probably agree that there's something going on that fits some non-athropomorphizing, non-sentience-assigning definition of "understanding"

As for the point about improvement - I think that's an orthogonal issue to the overall code quality. With regard to human codebases - there's plenty of scenarios that negate the improvement of individuals. We're comparing organizations with LLMs - not individuals with LLMs and that makes a significant difference.

> while a human you can more or less dump them everything you sit on, and let them shift it through, and they'll mostly make it out OK

i dont see why software engineers are paid so well, and are so hard to hire?

just dump a bunch of requirements on a homeless person and itll just work out