My experience with Claude has been similar. I'm not a professional programmer. I just make my own tools with AutoHotkey script. I've tinkered for probably 20 years or so, first with AHK v1, then v2. Over the years, I've found the learning process very difficult and frustrating. For the first 10 years I just used hotstrings and very basic guis, I would learn a few new skills and implement them, then try to learn more, get frustrated, and stop for a while. I'd keep using the hotstrings and tools I'd made, but wouldn't learn anything new until I started again.
Anyway, the emergence of AI code majorly jumpstarted my coding abilities. I suspect that there might be a disadvantage in that learning the "hard way" over years of trial and error might give a broader foundation of knowledge at whatever level/depth the (human) coder is at. So for example, if something fails, I'll have a broad knowledge base of why it failed. That said, AI can serve as an "external brain" if I choose to use it that way. I can ask Claude why something failed, and it will happily explain it. Also, AI is able to introduce me to new coding techniques in a way that is immediately context-relevant, because it is used for projects and tools that I, personally, want to make and use. My AutoCorrect2 project had sort of "evolved" over time, as I was first learning (the hard way) the different functionalities. So it was a couple thousand lines of total chaos. It was like impossible to maintain. Fortunately, I had written a comprehensive user manual too.. I attached the code and the manual to a claude chat and told it to refactor the code any way it wanted, but to use best-practice code structure, consistent variable naming, and any other improvements that it recommended. It completely remade the project using classes and setting things up in modules. Very little debugging was needed. I suspect that attaching the user manual was an important part of this, because it gave a text description of the different components, what they are for, and what they do. This essentially acted like a 40-page prompt for the chat.
