From what I can tell, rather than a simple difference in expectation (which could explain your positive experience vs others), it seems to be a "comfort within uncertainty" difference that, from what I can tell, is a personality trait!
You're comfortable with the uncertainty, and accommodate it in your use and expectations. You're left feeling good about the experience, within that uncertainty. Others are repelled by uncertainty, so will have a negative experience, regardless of how well it may work for a subset of tasks they try, because that repulsive uncertainty is always present.
I think it would be interesting (and possibly very useful/profitable for the marketing/UI departments of companies that use AI) to find the relation between perceived AI usefulness and the results of some of the "standard" personality tests.
It's not comfort with uncertainty, it's discomfort with the predictable effects of uncertainty.
I don't want to have to waste time tidying up after an unreliable software tool which is being sold as saving me time. I don't want to be misled by hallucinated fantasies that have no relationship to reality. (See also - lawyers getting laughed out of courtrooms because of this.)
I don't want to have to cancel a travel booking because an AI agent booked me a holiday in Angkor Wat when I wanted a train ticket to Crystal Palace in South London.
Hypotheticals? Not even slightly. Ask anyone who's lost their KDP author account on Amazon or been locked out of Meta because of AI moderation errors.
This is common sense, not some kind of personality flaw.
I'm happy using LLMs for coding and research, but it's also clear the technology is in perpetual beta - at best - and is being wildly oversold.
Normal software operating with this level of reliability would be called "very buggy."
But apparently LLMs get a pass because one day they might not be as buggy as they are today.
Which - if you think about it - is ridiculous, even by the usual standards of the software industry.
I wonder if this is like dishwasher usage. As a kid growing up we never used the dishwasher. It was just the drying rack. The reason was you had to rinse off the big stuff anyways, and then the resulting quality of dishwashing was poor in it. You'd often get a fork with rice stuck between it still, which was unacceptable.
As a grown up now I use a dishwasher for everything that is permitted to go in it. I still have to rinse off plates first, and occasionally I do see rice between a fork that I have to then clean manually. But I'm not comfortable knowing that it won't clean as well as I could by hand, but it does a good enough job -- and in some ways a much better job (it uses much hotter water than I do by hand). I don't know if my mom could ever really be comfortable with it though.
This is a funny example since, for a long time anyway, dishwashers have been much better at actually sanitizing dishes due to the much higher temperatures that can be used vs hand washing. I don't feel like hand washed dishes are truly clean. Oh you rubbed it with a nasty dish rag and water cool enough to touch? greeeeaaaaat
It's still egregious because the main theme is "Learn how to work with AI so you won't be left behind in the future!" The analogy in that case is to waste time pointlessly learning the quirks of old dishwashers while new dishwashers won't have them in the future.
You're comfortable with the uncertainty, and accommodate it in your use and expectations. You're left feeling good about the experience, within that uncertainty. Others are repelled by uncertainty, so will have a negative experience, regardless of how well it may work for a subset of tasks they try, because that repulsive uncertainty is always present.
I think it would be interesting (and possibly very useful/profitable for the marketing/UI departments of companies that use AI) to find the relation between perceived AI usefulness and the results of some of the "standard" personality tests.