I program as a hobby, personal projects because I can.

I recently set up a local llm to see what the fuss is about and other than the few ringer solutions my experience is as you described. 2min promping, 5min waiting, 3hrs debugging or just doing it myself.

I am very likely doing it wrong, and it does speed up some aspects, but I wouldn't say I trust llm code any more than my own. Until it runs and throws an error, the llm is 100% confident that it has written perfect code.