They can be guided. For example I asked Claude to benchmark some SystemVerilog.
First it just did time ./run.sh and I was like "no, idiot. That's going to include the compilation/startup overhead."
So then it said "I'll just increase the simulation time to amortise the startup cost." Again I told it that was bad and to actually measure the time in SV.
So since SV has no wall-time functions, it used $system("date") or some bollocks like that. No! I said - use DPI-C.
Finally it did the right thing. Would it have been quicker to do it myself? Absolutely not.
Current AI is at lazy junior engineer level (but sped up 10000 times). You just have to make sure they don't make lazy dumb decisions. E.g. they're going to do everything in Bash if give half a chance.
Tbf to AI I think they've learned a lot of this from humans. I bet if you searched for $system in SV you will find a lot of hand crafted horrors. I've seen human-written C code that found an ELF symbol by system("nm ... | grep ... | awk ..."). I shit you not.