I agree with the sentiments that it important to understand the code during major refactoring projects. But what if while the code was being refactored the AI was asked in addition to keep a ledger of the changes it made and why. That ledger could be the basis of providing understanding to a code base that most likely had minimal corporate understanding in the first place. And because it is ok text format, the learning scales well instead of being consolidated to a single team of people working on the project.

I don’t believe it has to be this zero sum game where either you use AI and lose understanding or you don’t use AI and gain understanding. There’s a way to do both since, if used properly, AI could be the best teacher we’ve had.