I think you’re missing the point. The point is that I’m not qualified to evaluate the LLM’s output in this context. Having it self-report doesn’t change that fact, it’s just playing hide the pickle by moving the evaluation around.

Not at all - my point was that it can effectively tutor you sufficiently for you to figure out if the code it wrote earlier was passable or not. These things are unbelievably good at knowledge retrieval and synthesis. Gemini makes lots of boneheaded mistakes when it comes to the finer points of C++ but it has an uncanny ability to produce documentation and snippets in the immediate vicinity of what I'm after.

Sure, that approach could fail in the face of it having solidly internalized an absolutely backwards conception of an entire area. But that seems exceedingly unlikely to me.

It will also be incredibly time consuming if you're starting from zero on the topic in question. But then if you're trying to write related code you were already committed to that uphill battle, right?