This matches my experience. A recent anecdote:

I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo.

I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them.

I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ...

Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months.

As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago.

I'm finding that too. I have old stale projects that I'm hesitant to try and fix because I know it will involve hours of frustrating work figuring out how to upgrade core dependencies.

Now I can genuinely point Claude Code at them and say "upgrade this to the latest versions" and it will do most of that tedious work for me.

I can even have it fill in some missing tests and gaps in the documentation at the same time.