In defense of the LLM here: learning COM from scratch given its lack of accessible documentation would have forced us to reach for C# for this minor project.

The LLM gave us an initial boost of productivity and (false) confidence that enabled us to get at the problem with Rust. While the LLM's output was flawed, using it did actually cause us to learn a lot about COM by allowing us to even getting started. That somewhat flies in the face of a lot of the "tech debt" criticisms levied at LLMs (including by me). Yes, we accumulated a bit of debt while working on the project, but were in this case able to pay it off before shipping and it gave us the leverage we needed to approach this problem using pure Rust.