Exactly. Simply asking agentic coding tools to clean up code bases, to do some targeted refactorings, to enforce things like SOLID principles, and other good practices can result in a lot of easy improvements.

I've noticed a thing where by default, agentic coding tools are reluctant to remove code. Even when you tell them to. It will bend over backwards to keep old code around, to add complexity for allowing that code to still be called, etc. Super annoying if you are basically just prototyping. You basically end up with a lot of dead code, which than confuses things when you try to add to it. But once you know this, you can just ask it to get rid of the legacy stuff.

Keeping the code base clean, actually stimulates AIs to do the right thing. If there are lots of tests, it will add more when creating new functionality. If there's documentation, it will update that without needing to be prompted as well.

As code harnesses improve, a lot of this is probably being built in as well. Which means even less experienced prompters can get decent results.