I like to always tell interns/new hires that I measure their productivity in the amount of questions they're asking (whether its to me, seeing them roam into people's cubes or in company chat systems). AI has changed that calculus a bit since they can use the magic talking box to query the codebase with varying degrees of accuracy or as a search engine for someone's random internal wiki article/ticket from years ago.

Nevertheless though, we're blessed with a codebase that is several orders of magnitude larger than what the human brain can fully internalize so if you're trying to do anything remotely interesting, you're going to have questions.