Comment by max_unbearable

The honest summary that doesn't show up in the six-month roundup: the unevenness. Boilerplate, tests, scaffolding, glue code: dramatically faster, sometimes 5-10x. Architecture, data modeling, careful security work, judgment calls about what to build: same as before, sometimes slower because tab-completion sneaks in plausible-but-wrong defaults you then have to undo.

The thing headline numbers ("AI made me 3x faster") hide is which 30% of the work the AI sped up and which 70% didn't move. For a solo dev the survivable bet got smaller, and that's the real change, not raw productivity. AI made certain projects worth attempting at all that wouldn't have been viable six months earlier.