Data point: I run a site where users submit a record. There was a request months ago to allow users to edit the record after submitting. I put it off because while it's an established pattern it touches a lot of things and I found it annoying busy work and thus low priority. So then gpt5-codex came out and allowed me to use it in codex cli with my existing member account. I asked it to support edit for that feature all the way through the backend with a pleasing UI that fit my theme. It one-shotted it in about ten minutes. I asked for one UI adjustment that I decided I liked better, another five minutes, and I reviewed and released it to prod within an hour. So, you know, months versus an hour.
He's referring to the reality that AI helps you pick up and finish tasks that you otherwise would have put off. I see this all day every day with my side projects as well as security and customer escalations that come into my team. It's not that Giant Project X was done six times as fast. It's more like we were able to do six small but consequential bug fixes and security updates while we continued to push on the large feature.
“If you make a machine that can wash the dishes in an hour, is that more productive than not doing the dishes for months?” - Yes! That’s the definition of productivity!! The dishes are getting done now and they weren’t before! lol
