So, I am paying $20, for a glorified code generator, that may or may not be correct, to write a small function that I can do for free, and be confident about the correctness, if I have not been lazy to implement a test for it.

If you point out, with test it's also the same with any AI tool available, but to come to that result, I have to continuously prompt it till it gives me the desired output, while I may be able to do it in 2/3 iterations.

Reading documentation always made me little bit knowledgeable than before, while prompting the LLM, gives me nothing of knowledge.

And, I also have to decide which LLM would be good for the task at hand, and most of them will not be free (unless I use a local, but that will also use GPU, and add an energy cost)

I may be nitpicking, but I see too many holes with this approach

The biggest hole you don't see is that it's worth the $20 to make me overcome my laziness, because I don't like writing code, but I like making stuff, and this way I can make stuff while fooling my brain into thinking I'm not writing code.

Not only that, but the process described is how you train a junior dev.

There, at least, the wasted time results in the training of a human being who can become sophisticated enough to become a trusted independent implementer in a relatively short duration

Your time isn't free, and I'd certainly with more than $20/month.

I find it extremely useful as a smarter autocomplete, especially for the tedious work - changing function definitions, updating queries when DB schema changes, and writing http requests/api calls from vendor/library documentation.