Strangely, I feel that using Claude helps me stay MORE focused on what I am actually trying to accomplish.

In the prior 30 years of my programming life, so much time was spent "yak shaving"... setting up all the boilerplate, adding basic functionality you always have to do, setting up support systems, etc. With Claude, all of those things are so quick to complete that I can stay focused on what I am actually trying to do, and can therefore keep more of the core functionality I am caring about in my head. I don't have to push the core, novel, parts of my work aside to do the parts that are the same across other projects.

But apart from side projects these true new setups happen rarely. When working at a company you probably work on an already established codebase with known patterns.

So what you say is true about boilerplate reduction, but that’s not a huge ROI for enterprise software.

(Some exceptions apply, there’s always some setup work for a new microservice etc. But even those don’t happen weekly or even monthly)