The distinction is that you cannot make the LLM do the drilling. And the way these tools are designed is to train the user to use the LLM rather than their own brain, so they'll never learn it themselves.

A big problem with the "Just read the code" approach is that reading the code at the level deep enough to truly understand it is at minimum equally time-consuming than writing the code in the first place. (And in practice tends to be significantly worse) Anyone who claims they're reading the LLM's code output properly is on some level lying to them.

Human brains are simply bad at consistently monitoring output like that, especially if the output is consistently "good", especially especially when the errors appear to be "good" output on the surface level. This is universal across all fields and tools.