Yes - this is certainly true. I would have to concede that I could not speak to how my thesis would map onto a truly colossal codebase.

That said - I would (again, maybe naively) suppose it's not hugely different - much of the work I do occurs in code where many people have and will work on it, and where the size of the codebase dwarfs model context windows.

In that case, I feel the same - current frontier models, when properly oriented to a task, with some assist on the big-picture thinking - are more than capable of generating good code that can slot into big codebases with many moving pieces. Of course, I'd have to point to other people's work to defend this, but I think that's still pretty reasonable especially against the declared "LLMs are worse than useless for generating code".