You have the copilot mode which takes no learning at all which might give you some speedup, especially if you are doing repetitive stuff, it might even 10x+ you.
You have cmdk mode which you need to prompt and seems to he a lobotomized version of chat. I find putting comments and waiting for the copilot mode to kick in better as then the way we got there is saved.
Then there is agentic editing chat: that is the timewaster you speak off I believe, but what is there to learn? Sometimes it generates a metric ton of code, including in legacy massive code bases, that help, and often it just cannot do whatever.
I don't think these cases you make, or at least, when the second one goes beyond the basics, are different. There is nothing to learn except that you need read all the code, decide what you want in tech detail and ask that of the agentic chat. Anything else fails beyond the basics and 'learning to use it' will be that but if you didn't know that after 5 minutes you definitely didn't do any 'fine tuned pycharm ide', ever.
It is a tool that customizes code it ingested for your case specifically, if it can. That is it. If it never saw a case, it won't solve it, no matter what you 'learn to use'. And I am fine doing that in public: we use LLMs a lot and I can give you very simple cases that, besides (and often even that doesn't work) typing up the exact code, it will never fix with the current models. It just gets stuck doing meaningless changes with confidence.
