> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

No, this is a classic mistake. The value of a project is in the instantaneous utility it provides integrated over time. Some things are valuable because they are throwaway single shots that do a thing that's hard. In the past, making those was too costly for the value, but as software drops to near-zero in marginal cost they're worth doing.

e.g. the costco receipts site involves clicking through to view receipts and only 10 'view receipt' buttons per page. I might have stuck it out in the past, but instead I just described the problem to my claw-like and gave it my user/pass and it found it for me while I was dressing the baby. It wrote some Playwright code and this and that and drove the browser interactively.

That code is throwaway code but it was quite useful.