I hate to play the "you're holding it wrong" card, but when I started, I had more or less the same experience. Eventually you start to learn how to better talk to it in order to get better results.

Something I've found useful with Claude Code is that it works a lot better if I give it many small tasks to perform to eventually get the big thing done, rather than just dumping the big thing in its lap. You can do this interactively (prompt, output, prompt, output, prompt, output...) or by writing a big markdown file with the steps to build it laid out.

While this matches my experience, it's worth mentioning thar the act of breaking a task up into the correct chunk size and describing it in English is itself a non trivial task which can be more time consuming than simply writing the actual code.

The fact that it works is amazing, but I'm less convinced that it's enhancing my productivity.

(I think they real productivity boost for me is if I still write the code and have the assistant write test coverage based on diffs, which is trivial to prompt for good results)

Similar here. AI works much better as a consultant than as a developer. I ask it all kinds of things I have suspicions and intuitions about and it provides clarity and examples. It's great for subroutines. Trying to make full programs is just too large of a space. It's difficult to communicate all the implicit requirements.

This. For me (senior as in I am in the field since last century), that's how I use it. "I want to do that, with this data, to obtain that"

I still do the part of my job that I got experience on, analyze the need, and use the AI like an assistant to do small libraries or part of code. Like these, errors have less chance to appear. Then I glue that together.

For me the time ratio is best use like that. If I have to describe the whole thing, I'm not far from doing it myself, so there's no need for me.

Important: I work alone, not in a team, so maybe it has an impact on my thought

I just tried to use it for something I consider it to provide the most benefit (for my case). Being able to fully delegate a complicated (and boring) part to a machine would give me more time for the things I'm really interested in. I think we are on the right track in this regard, but we still have a long way to go.

It’d be nice if we could “pipe” prompts directly similar to how we pipe multiple Unix commands to eventually get what we really want.

Then we can give someone that entire string of prompts as a repeatable recipe.