Five months in and the model writes my functions faster than I can read them, is this still worth learning

You already found the problem and then asked a different question. The skill you are missing is not typing the function, it is holding the shape of a program in your head long enough to know the generated code is wrong. Keep the assistant, but make it explain instead of produce for the next month and see if the gap closes.

I do first-round screens for a small backend team. Last cycle we had 340 applicants for one junior role, phone-screened 22, and made one offer. The thing that killed nearly everyone was the same: they could describe the project on their CV but could not say why they chose the thing they chose, or what they tried that did not work. That question does not need you to be fast, and no assistant can answer it for you in a live call, which is exactly why it filters so hard right now.

I did it your way for eight months and it cost me a year. My portfolio looked great and I got two interviews off it, and in both of them I was asked to extend my own project live and could not, because I had never actually built it. Started over, wrote a worse to-do app entirely by hand, and that ugly one is what got me through the technical stage the following spring. The rebuild was four weeks. The pretending was eight months.

I work in a codebase where about half my output is now assistant-drafted and the other half is stuff I would never trust it with, so I see both sides daily. The generated half is fine because I can read a diff and know instantly whether it fits the system, and that reading ability came from years of writing the boring version by hand. There is no shortcut into the reviewing skill that skips the writing skill, at least not one anyone has shown me. Keep going, just change what you spend the ten hours on.

Going to push back on the top answer a bit. Telling a beginner to make the assistant explain assumes they can tell a good explanation from a confident wrong one, and at five months you often cannot. What worked for the two people I mentored was cruder: assistant off entirely for anything under twenty lines, assistant on for boilerplate and config you will never be asked about in an interview. Draw the line by category, not by intent, because intent evaporates at 11pm when the thing will not run.

One practical thing nobody mentions: keep a text file of every bug that took you more than an hour, one line for the symptom and one for the cause. Mine is 190 lines after two years and I reread it before interviews. It is also the fastest cure for the feeling that you are not learning anything.