I wouldn't call that cursed but useful tooling usage. Had the same scenario where I wanted to work on a tool for a project written in Go, of which I know next to nothing. Claude code was able to spit out 100's line of code that worked and I (almost) understood and could explain what was happening where and why, but I had no chance of debugging or extending it on my own.

I've limited myself to only use Claude's webchat to do almost exactly as you've mentioned except creating snippets, it can only explain or debug code I enter. I prompt it to link relevant sources for solutions I seek. Plus it assists me subdivide, prioritise and plan my project in chunks so I don't get lost.

It has saved me a lot of time this way while still enjoying working on a project

Interesting how you write the code first then put it into claude. What's the reason there? I guess that is where I find the most benefit is not writing out the syntax, even though I could I just can't be bothered. I often start with the snippet then refactor to the style of code I like. For code I don't know that well like c++ I like to get a snippet so I can then research into those functions that is used and go from there.