"productivity" is a misnomer. Sort of. The things I'm building are all things I've had on the back burner for years. Most of which I never would have bothered to do. But AI lets me ignore that excuse and just do it.

The productivity comes from not having the startup costs. You don’t need to research the best way to do X, just verify that X works via tests and documentation. I find it still takes T hours to actually implement X with an agent, but if I didn’t know how to do X it eliminates that startup cost which might make it take 3T hours instead.

The only downside is not learning about method Y or Z that work differently than X but would also be sufficient, and you don’t learn the nuances and details of the problem space for X, Y, and Z.