I'm the opposite, couldn't be bothered to work on code outside of work. Barely did at work because I was more focused on wrangling a small army of shitty contractors (thanks strategic partner initiative for firing all of our small shop contractors and replacing them with morons from "offshore").

Now with LLMs I find myself doing small projects that interest me or have some utility for me outside of work, and doing a lot more development in the codebases at work outside of just review/docs/arch than I was before. Also making small tools that I find pleasant/useful but were not important enough to spend time on before.

Agreed - there was always a set of things I wanted to do that I knew the magic core for, but wanted a team of implementers for the curft, the 100k of actual testing harnesses, hyperparameter exploration, etc.. . I now have that team of implementers. All the problems seem research-y though - optimal binary transport systems that are zero-copy and compatible with languages, fast physical simulation optimizers, etc etc... So, things that all had a _LOT_ of busywork around the magic core.