[djray]

The OP misunderstands (perhaps deliberately or for humorous effect) what a co-pilot is. This is telling:

"I learned that I need to stay firmly in the driver’s seat when tackling new tech."

Er, that's pretty much what a pilot is supposed to do! You can't (as yet) just give an AI free reign over your codebase and expect to come back later that day to discover a fully finished implementation. Maybe unless your prompt was "Make a snake game in Python". A pilot would be supervising their co-pilot at all times.

Comparing AIs to junior devs is getting tiresome. AIs like Claude and newer versions of ChatGPT have incredible knowledge bases. Yes, they do slip up, especially with esoteric matters where there are few authoritative (or several conflicting) sources, but the breadth of knowledge in and of itself is very valuable. As an anecdote, neither Claude nor ChatGPT were able to accurately answer a question I had about file operation flags yesterday, but when I said to ChatGPT that its answer wasn't correct, it apologised and said the Raymond Chen article it had sourced wasn't super clear about the particular combination I'd asked about. That's like having your own research assistant, not a headstrong overconfident junior dev. Yes, they make mistakes, but at least now they'll admit to them. This is a long way from a year or two ago.

In conclusion: don't use an AI as one of your primary sources of information for technology you're new to, especially if you're not double-checking its answers like a good pilot.