Totally get where you’re coming from. I had a similar first impression, it felt slow, and the output wasn’t great unless I hand-held it through every step.
What helped me was shifting how I use it. I don’t treat it like a junior dev anymore, I treat it more like a second brain. For example:
I use Claude Code to explore options before I commit to a design. I’ll ask it “what are 3 ways to abstract this logic?” and sometimes that alone gives me a better direction.
It’s pretty good at turning rough notes or comments into starter code or test cases. That saves time on boilerplate.
If I feed it a clean, self-contained chunk of code and ask for a targeted change (e.g., “convert this to async”), it often nails it. But yeah, across a codebase, not so much.