I think most of what you claim to be doing better is really just a result of you not really being confronted with any sort of "adversarial input", at least not as much as you'd have in corporate
it's hard to trust a claim about someone writing "bug-free" and "extensible/maintainable" code from the singular developer and user for that system... maintainability can't really be a thing you can judge when you're not a single step removed from the person who built it in the first place - maybe you'll feel different if you have to pick up the project again after a couple years' inactivity
unless they changed something in the like 2 months (edit: besides implementing a cap for claude code specifically, since other tools already had caps) since ive left my job there im pretty sure 1500$ is the very max you can use after maxing out free calls, initial budget, then 2 extensions individually reviewed by your manager
higher ups pushed for these last 2 years to be AI focused so I don't think this restriction is a measure of "don't use too much AI" as much as it is a measure of "don't use only 'manual' AI tooling" since we had a dozen more specialized tools in-house running locally or otherwise that didn't count towards the budget
it's hard to trust a claim about someone writing "bug-free" and "extensible/maintainable" code from the singular developer and user for that system... maintainability can't really be a thing you can judge when you're not a single step removed from the person who built it in the first place - maybe you'll feel different if you have to pick up the project again after a couple years' inactivity