Is that the experience you had? What if you ask it questions about the codebase?

I find AI agents really great for codebase exploration and understanding how it works. In some ways even moreso than from manual implementation since it's easier to get a global picture.

You can also ask it questions like "are there recurring patterns of how X is done in the codebase?" to which it might answer sometime like "there are actually three competing patterns" and tell you what they are and the exact files, and then you can choose to refactor them if you want.