If you treat the model like an excellent bluffer, it has never been more fun to challenge a model. To me, there is something deeply intellectually satisfying about "proving" it incorrect, and I like being deeply critical of what the model spits back out. I find that refinement process (with the constant sycophancy turned down in the system prompt) creates a really good loop of critical evaluation that would be hard to get in anywhere else. You can treat it just like the Socratic method, but instead of a benevolent teacher, you get a probabilistic bullshit artist. Lots of fun, highly recommend.
I find it to be a really tight loop and results in very high quality code at a high velocity.
Inevitably, it fails frequently at both. Any "reasoning" it is doing is merely rehashing ideas that someone else has already posited. This helps some of the times, but the vast majority of the time it just chooses a biased perspective (frequently the most common) and then regurgitates tired old talking points. This contrasts greatly to speaking with others who often have more intuitive notions that tend to be less polished and rote.
I'd love for LLMs to be better sounding boards, but so far they fail miserably far too often for my tastes. To each their own though.
Yes, but eventually the intellectual whack-a-mole gets tiresome unless you get really, really good at simultaneously cornering it and not letting it concede to your point.