My experience is mostly the opposite. Provided the right context and prompt, CC will generally produce code, even in domains I know, 10-20x faster.

Quality is a different issue, sure.

> I find it intellectually exhausting to describe to a machine what I want, when I could build something better in the same amount of time, and it isn't for lack of understanding how the LLM works.

I don’t even bother. Most of my use cases have been when I’m sure I’ve done the same type of work before (tests, crud query,…). I describe the structure of the code and let it replicate the pattern.

For any fundamental alteration, I bring out my vim/emacs-fu. But after a while, you start to have good abstractions, and you spend your time more on thinking than on coding (most solutions are a few lines of codes).