I started on computers because I wanted to do stuff (photo manipulation and 3d modelling) and then I was fascinated by how to get the computers to do stuff (games and scripts). But just like you, I want things to be done correctly and efficiently.

Coding for me is more reading than typing, because any time I'm not exactly clear on the code I want to write, it's because there's some aspects of the problem or the tools to solve it that I do not grasp well. So, I usually have a lot of documentations around me for the stuff I'm working on. And that means I don't like LLM for that, because there's no clear signal for wrongness.

And when I'm clear on the code to write and I find it tedious, that usually means that it's time to abstract away the tediousness. LLMs won't help with that, because it's more of a perspective shift than a clear methodology.

LLMs, in its current forms of offering, is like asking a random stranger in a bar. They may know the answer or not. They may give you an incoherent answer even if they know or fabricate stuff when they don't know. But there's still a plus, is that you may still get "I don't know" or silence instead of a wrong answer. Like getting an empty list when making a web search. Which is a good signal by itself.

Neither LLMs nor popular search engines return "I don't know" often enough. They will waste your time with bad approximations to an answer instead. But as you say, "the thing you're asking for might not exist" is useful information, and lets you make faster progress with your guessing, so this compulsion to always supply an answer just slows down the process of getting to a good one.

I use my history as mich as I use a search engine at this point. For work stuff, I just bookmark docs. I also use specialized sites for some search sessions (reddit, hn, npmjs, oreilly,…)