Daily Claude Code user for about three months, building a full-stack web app. My honest assessment: net positive, but the productivity gain is wildly uneven across tasks. **Where it genuinely 10x'd me:** boilerplate API routes, CSS styling, writing database queries, generating repetitive CRUD logic. Anything where the pattern is well-established and I just need a correct implementation fast. I went from idea to deployed product in days instead of weeks. **Where it made things worse, not better:** debugging its own output. When something breaks in AI-generated code, I spend MORE time than if I had written it myself, because I lack the mental context of why each decision was made. I am reverse-engineering intent from code I technically authored but did not think through. **The thing nobody warns you about:** it makes you mass-produce decisions you did not consciously make. Every generated function contains dozens of micro-decisions -- error handling strategy, variable naming, return format, edge case coverage. When you write code yourself, you make those decisions one by one. When AI generates it, you accept them in bulk. Weeks later, those unconscious decisions bite you as inconsistencies. **My actual productivity math:** I ship features maybe 5x faster. But I spend about 2x more time on maintenance, debugging, and refactoring than I would with hand-written code. Net is still strongly positive -- roughly 3x overall. But it is NOT the 10x that the hype suggests, because the maintenance cost is hidden and delayed. **The biggest surprise:** the tool did not make me a faster coder. It made me a different kind of worker. I went from writing code to reviewing code, from architect to editor. The skill that matters most now is not coding ability -- it is judgment about what to accept, what to reject, and what to rewrite.