That's been my experience as well, it's faster to write a query for a model than to google and go through bunch of blogs or stackoverflow discussions. It's not always right, but that's also true for stuff you find online. The big advantage is that you get a response tailored to what you're actually trying to do, and like you said, if it's incorrect at least now you know what to look for.
And you can run pretrained models locally already if you have a relatively beefy machine. FauxPilot is an example. I imagine in a few years running local models is going to become a lot more accessible.