Interns and new hires know how to look at a library and reuse code. Most will recognize being stuck and ask for help. My biggest gripes with LLMs is their insistence on writing everything from scratch and how they start slinging and slopping when some little hing goes wrong. Your human comparisons don't do this on average. You can rely on them being able to at least attempt each point in a step by step guide, LLMs it's crossing fingers that they actually follow instructions

This is one point where the maintainability comes in. The other is in having anyone who knows and understands the code base. With your comparison, there is a sr eng around. Today, I have sr eng friends who haven't looked at their own code in weeks, have no idea what's in there (friend is doing an experiment in pushing vibe coding to the limits at a shitty corpo job).

What happens when no one knows what's the code even looks like, let alone how it works?