You want them to make code more simple and elegant by themselves, no other direction? "Make this code simple and elegant, no mistakes, no hallucinations"? I don't think that's realistic at the moment.

But with suitable direction, they can definitely improve codebases - especially a typical enterprise codebase, which, if you don't like LLM code, you would hate with a passion. (I can only assume you've never seen such code otherwise your perspective would be different.)

> Fully leaning into LLM doing as much of the coding and understanding as can be handed off to them seems insane to me, I don't mean this to offend though.

I essentially agree, but there's a huge spectrum before you get to that point, and lots of ways to use it effectively that doesn't create tech debt.