It depends on what you are doing exactly. But, I'm in the same boat as you, more programmer and less artist. The one thing that helps me is to really try learning all the tricks the software provides. My choice is Blender. There are tons of modifiers, which can make modelling so much easier. A basic asteroid for example can be done using a cube, add subdivision to get a sphere shape, use a couple displacement modifiers with something like cloud textures(one for bigger detail, one for smaller detail), and then move the original 6 verts of the cube around to get a nicer shape. Modifiers give the power to do lots of things in a non-destructive way, which helps.

Besides modifiers, there are plenty of other tools available, things like curves, extra primitives to start with, add-ons, neat stuff like meta-balls, just lots of stuff. Once you learn about all these things and think about it similar to how you think about coding, over time you will start seeing how to combine things to end up with workable models. As long as you aren't expecting perfect topology this method works pretty well.