> If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times

I think here lies the difference OP is talking about. You are reading your own code, which means you had to first put in the effort to write it. If you use LLMs, you are reading code you didn't write.

I read other people’s code all the time. I work as a platform engineer with sre functions.

Gemini 3 by itself is insufficient. I often find myself tracing through things or testing during runtime to understand how things behave. Claude Opus is not much better for this.

On the other hand, pairing with Gemini 3 feels like pairing with other people. No one is going to get everything right all the time. I might ask Gemini to construct gcloud commands or look things up for me, but we’re trying to figure things out together.

If I need to change someone's code, I also read it. several times.