Additionally, I would expect that AIs wouldn't fare as well in situations where footguns abound, specialization is high, and there's a much smaller body of code

Additionally, I would expect that AIs wouldn't fare as well in situations where footguns abound, specialization is high, and there's a much smaller body of code to learn from — think things like hardware drivers written in C or C++ or embedded firmware with restricted resources, which is much less forgiving than e.g. CRUD web app backend written in Python.