My experience matched this almost too closely. Had a comparison-aggregator side project sitting at maybe 20% done for over a year. I'd open it once a month, scroll through the still-need-to-do list, get tired, close the tab. Pairing with Claude for a couple of weekends got me past the half-built wall. The thing that surprised me wasn't raw speed. It was that I stopped having to spend an hour reloading my own old code into my head before I could do anything. That re-entry tax is what always killed it for me. The hype is annoying but the people dunking on these tools mostly aren't using them for the boring stuff they're actually decent at.