Actually for me it was the opposite: before I wasn't able to play around and experiment in my free time that much, because I didn't have enough energy left to actualize the thoughts and ideas I have since I have a day job.

Now, since the bottleneck of moving the fingers to write code has gone down, I actually started to enjoy doing side projects. The mental stress from writing code has gone down drastically with Claude Code, and I feel the urge to create more nowadays!