That's one dimension. Another is how much you care.

For my own projects, little productivity apps for my own needs, I'm easily 20x more productive. I'm building so many more of them, and at a much higher level of polish. But that's simply because I don't care about the code, long-term maintenance, or anything else. I just need them to do a thing, and if they do the thing, I'm good. I used to make an effort calculation before building these things, but now I just tell Claude "hey, build this", and two hours later it's built well enough to be useful.

OTOH, at work, I'm probably about as fast as I was before, maybe even a bit slower. But the quality of my work has increased quite a bit, because I no longer take the shortcuts I used to take to push things out. I'm spending much more time in planning and in code reviews rather than actually typing code.

Either way, the idea that these obvious changes are just people fooling themselves is, at this point, no longer a reasonable position. And the claim that "AI will run out of money and just be turned off due to the huge operational cost" is so implausible that I would feel ashamed of myself if I used this as a straw man for what AI skeptics believe.

I understand what you're saying about side projects but it just sounds... like buying a landscape wall print from IKEA instead of taking a photo and having it printed on canvas.

My non-work projects are exercises for the brain and for learning, and if instead I could just automagic them into existence they'd feel hollow and almost cheating.