But then I may as well have the AI say no, I don't know how to do that, here are some useful resources. Instead of misleading me and making me waste my time figuring out why the code doesn't work

We might get there at some point. But it's not natural for this technology. It wasn't trained to recognize what it does and doesn't know. But I'm hopeful. It was terrible at doing math as well and it's getting significantly better with just more effort.

It might be hard to tune it though so that AI won't claim that it doesn't know something when it does, by error, or just because it doesn't like you.

It's not uncommon for a student to say they don't know something they actually do when they are questioned.

Maybe that idea has probably been considered (a lot) and never implemented because the can't tell?