Hobby programmer her as well. I know you I've spent a lot of time searching for solutions or hints for, especially when it's about edge cases. So using AI as an alt. to a search engine have saved me sooo much time!

Another thing with the approach. I read somewhere that it require about 10 times as much energy to ask an AI instead of doing a web search and spending a little time looking through the result. So it's something I try to think of to motivate myself with, to do as many usual web searches as possible, saving AI queries for when it matters more.