[esafak]

Conversely, it is a pleasure to watch an LLM effortlessly extend a well-built code base in the existing style.

[cryptica]

Agreed. I feel vindicated by the fact that others are noticing this too.

On ugly codebases, you have to wrestle with it to make it address the root cause and prevent it from hacking around every problem. It's like playing a horrible game of Whac-a-Mole; completely different experience.