Personally I like the older kind of chatbots where I can ask it to write me something little (a function, a SQL query, ...) and I have it in 10-30 seconds and can think about it, try it, look in the manual to confirm it, or give it feedback or ask for something else. This can be a lot more efficient than looking in incomplete or badly organized manuals (MUI, react-router, ...) or filtering out the wrong answers on Stack Overflow that Stack Overflow doesn't filter out.

I can't stand the more complex "agents" like Junie that will go off on a chain of thought and give an update every 30 seconds or so and then 10 minutes later I get something that's occasionally useful but often somewhere between horribly wrong and not even wrong.

This resonates, even though copy pasting from Claude et al seems like it should be inefficient somehow it feels less prone to getting completely off track compared to leaving something like cursor or aider chat running.