Interesting - I'm just the opposite. I had 100 side projects rattling around in my skull for years but had no desire to spend even more time on the computer after all the time at work on one, even though all of them from a technical perspective were well within my skillset. So now I can actually get them out of my head and basically for free with almost no effort. Maybe the way we view side projects is different - if you were doing a side project just for the love of the game, then yes I can see LLM outputs not scratching that itch. But if you are doing the side project because of some tangible benefit of it, then LLMs are great.