Are you actually faster with AI, or just busier?

Here is a question I have been avoiding because I am not sure I like my own answer: am I actually faster with AI, or just busier?

The output is undeniable. I produce more code, more drafts, more little tools than I did a year ago. But when I look at whether the thing that actually mattered shipped sooner, the picture gets murky. Some days the assistant clears an afternoon of tedium in ten minutes and I actually gained the afternoon. Other days I generate three versions of something, review all three, tweak the prompt, regenerate, and realize an hour later that I would have finished faster by just writing the thing once by hand.

The trap I keep falling into is mistaking motion for progress. Generating is so cheap now that I generate constantly, and generating feels like work, so I feel productive. But a lot of that output is stuff I then have to read, verify, and often throw away. The cost moved from writing to reviewing, and reviewing is quieter, so it does not feel like the bottleneck even when it is.

There is also a subtler version. AI lowers the activation energy for starting things, which sounds good, but it means I start more things. More half-built tools, more explorations, more "let me just quickly." Each one is faster to begin and none of them is necessarily faster to finish, and finishing was always the hard part.

I do think there are places where it is a clean, real speedup, the boring high-volume tasks, the stuff where the answer exists and just needs finding or transforming. And there are places where it mostly adds a review burden dressed up as help. I have not been honest with myself about which is which, and I suspect the ratio is worse than it feels.

So, two questions, and I want the honest version:

1. Where has AI made you actually faster at finishing the thing that mattered, not just producing more stuff?
2. Where has it quietly made you busier, more output, more reviewing, more half-finished starts, without moving the actual finish line?

I am asking because "faster" and "busier" feel identical from the inside, and I think a lot of us have been reporting the second as the first, to our bosses and to ourselves.