Me too. I’ve been playing with various coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot for some time, and I would say that their most useful feature is educating me. For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before, or help me debug a production issue. Then I would choose to write the code by myself after I’ve figured everything out with their help. Writing code by myself is definitely faster in most cases.

> For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before.

How do you verify it is teaching you the correct thing if you don't have any baseline to compare it to?

You are right, I don't have any baseline. I just try it and see if it works. One good thing about the software field is that I can compile and run the code for verification. It may not be optimal, but at least it's testable.

My thoughts on scripts are: the output is pretty bad too, but it doesn't matter as much in a script, because its just a short script, and all that really matters is that it kinda works.

That's what rubber ducking is

It sounds better when you get more specific about what it is. Many people have fallen prey to this and gone a tad loopy.

I am still working on tweaking how I work and design with Claude to hopefully unlock a level of output that I’m happy with.

Admittedly, part of it is my own desire for code that looks a certain way, not just that which solves the problem.