Of course; no one said anything about experimentation. Production code is what we're talking about.
If what you're saying is that your current experience involves a lot of process and friction to get small changes approved, that seems like a reasonable use case for hand-coding. I still prefer to make changes by hand myself when they're small and specific enough that explaining the change in English would be more work than directly making the change.
Even then, if there's any incentive to help the organization move more quickly, and there's no policy against AI usage, I'd give it a shot during the pre-coding stages. It costs almost nothing to open up Cursor's "Ask" mode and bounce your ideas off of Gemini or have it investigate the root cause of a bug.
What I typically do is have Gemini perform a broad initial investigation and describe its findings and suggestions with a list of relevant files, then throw all that into a Grok chat for a deeper investigation. (Grok is really strong at analysis in general, but its superpower seems to be a willingness to churn on sufficiently complex problems for as long as 5+ minutes in order to find the right answer.) I'll often have a bunch of Cursor agents and Grok chats going in parallel — bouncing between different bug investigations, enhancement plans, and one or two code reviews and QA tests of actual changes. Most of the time that AI saves isn't the act of emitting characters in and of itself.