The productivity angle everyone talks about is real, to a point. I use AI for drafting copy, squashing boilerplate code, summarizing user feedback. That part works. What I didn't expect is how much time I spend prompting, reprompting, and crosschecking outputs. Some days it nets out close to neutral.
What I'm genuinely curious about is whether solo builders and indie hackers here have found specific tools or workflows where AI is clearly additive rather than just reshuffling where the effort goes. Not in a general sense, specifically. What task went from painful to easy because of AI, and stayed easy after the novelty wore off?
The cost side matters too. A lot of these tools stack up fast when you're running lean, and the ROI math gets harder to justify when you're paying $2040/month per tool across five or six of them.
Curious what people are actually keeping in their stack six months in versus what got quietly cancelled.
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