Yes, sometimes you are actually indeed holding it wrong. Sometimes a product has to be used in a certain way to get good results. You're not going to blame the shampoo when someone uses only a tiny drop of it, and the hair remains dirty.
This is still early days with LLMs and coding assistants. You do have to hold them in the right way sometimes. If you're not willing to do that, or think that provides less value than doing it another way... great, good for you, do it the way you think is best for you.
I've been a coding assistant skeptic for a long time. I just started playing with Claude Code a month or so ago. I was frustrated for a bit until I learned how to hold it the right way. It is a long, long way from being a substitute for a real human programmer, but it's helpful to me. I certainly prefer it to pair programming with a human (I hate pair programming), so this provides value.
If you don't care to figure out for yourself if it can provide you value, that's your choice. But this technology is going to get better, and you might later find yourself wishing you'd looked into it earlier. Just like any new tool that starts out rough but eventually turns out to be very useful.
This is still early days with LLMs and coding assistants. You do have to hold them in the right way sometimes. If you're not willing to do that, or think that provides less value than doing it another way... great, good for you, do it the way you think is best for you.
I've been a coding assistant skeptic for a long time. I just started playing with Claude Code a month or so ago. I was frustrated for a bit until I learned how to hold it the right way. It is a long, long way from being a substitute for a real human programmer, but it's helpful to me. I certainly prefer it to pair programming with a human (I hate pair programming), so this provides value.
If you don't care to figure out for yourself if it can provide you value, that's your choice. But this technology is going to get better, and you might later find yourself wishing you'd looked into it earlier. Just like any new tool that starts out rough but eventually turns out to be very useful.