You can also just use AI and keep the scale of your changes small rather than refactoring the whole app with a change? This isn't super-weird.
My position is that AI could be useful to find the potential places for these changes, but it should be someone who's capable of thinking to implement them.
For me, AI has been a godsend for productivity because it's great at what I'm bad at. I'm not spending 99% of my day grinding away at C++ code; I'm never writing enough for it to become a world class language expert. I'm jumping between SQL queries, CSS, Java, bezier curves, Python, and shell. If I need to write something in a language I touch infrequently (e.g. Go or Ruby) it's nice to have individual blocks of code generated for me, so that I'm not slowed down by my ignorance on a language's iterator syntax, or whatever.
In the end, an exceptionally skilled programmer might be able to keep their core domain intact, but I think the vast majority would find that very difficult. So it might be possible once you cross a certain threshold, but considering the sheer amount of code required to deliver a single modern program, it's hard to know which parts to focus on. However, my perspective might be different because I'm coming from the point of view of delivering a working program, not from the perspective of open source development