I think both experience are true.
AI removes boredome AND removes the natural pauses where understanding used to form..
energy goes up, but so does the kind of "compression" of cognitive things.
I think its less a quesiton of "faster" or "slower" but rather who controls the tempo
> the kind of "compression" of cognitive things
compression is exactly what is missing for me when using agents, reading their approach doesn't let me compress the model in my head to evaluate it, and that was why i did programming in the first place.
After 4 hours of vibe coding I feel as tired as a full day of manual coding. The speed can be too much. If I only use it for a few minutes or an hour, it feels energising.